Star Performer
by Gamebird
Summary: This is the tale of building Starkiller Base. Armitage Hux has to overcome prejudices, unhappy coworkers, and the galaxy's worst boss. Somehow, at the end of everything he has and will accomplish, he will STILL be seen as an incompetent villain. This is the story of how he's more than that.
1. Gaining Credentials

**A/N: Armitage would be maybe fifteen years old here, fairly independent and rather full of himself. General Hux at this point in time would be Brendol. Readers with an excellent memory might recall a slightly older Dean Mulhale's appearance from Grey Order. She was in charge of one of the largest trooper schools then instead of what she is here, but that's nearly 20 years in the future. 'Sir' is the standard honorific regardless of gender. Hux's lack of language studies comes back to bite him in the ass much later, but that is, so far, not in any of the stories in this series.**

* * *

"Sir," Hux said respectfully. "I have been told you are the one I should speak to about my application for admittance into the engineering program." Or, rather, the rejection of his application.

The dean looked at him blankly, her gaze rising to the orange-red hair atop Hux's head. She stared at that for a long moment, before looking Hux in the eyes again. "You're the general's son."

Hux said nothing. It wasn't a question and from the woman's tone, it was clear she didn't approve. Of course, he'd known that well before coming in. There were precious few of the older members of the First Order who approved of General Hux, his revolutionary ideas, or the untimely ends the most outspoken of his political rivals invariably met. Few remained who were outspoken at all when it came to General Hux, but Dean Mulhale had never bothered to cloak her opinion of him. She didn't need to, since her role in academics would seem to minimize how much of a threat she could pose to the general's agenda.

"It's not part of your career track." She went back to the display she'd been reading. "You'll be an officer, not a technician."

Armitage was prepared for this. "I would argue that a well-educated, scientific mind is a necessity in the officer corps and, I dare say, a perspective that is lacking as currently constituted."

"It's lacking because those of liberal and scientific outlook have not survived in positions of power within the First Order."

"You will find that Huxes are excellent at survival." Proudly, he added, "And power."

She looked up at him without turning or raising her head. She spared him a wry smile, being more than five times his age. "I see," she said with a minimum of condescension. "Well, you have my attention. You'd best not squander it. But if I put you in those courses, you'll be lacking in other areas. No one graduates under my authority without filling all requirements. No matter what their last name is."

"I have reviewed the engineering curriculum. I would suggest I accommodate it by dropping History, Alien Language, and Military Science. I will also devote all electives to the sciences."

Her brows rose. " _You_ would drop Military Science? A Hux?"

"As a Hux, I have been well-trained in that for the last ten years. Frequent lectures. I can assure you, I can repeat most of them verbatim."

She gave him a tight, amused smile. "I know enough of your father to find that very believable. But you haven't addressed how you'd fill the requirements."

"I can test out of Military Science, as well as History. Alien Language is unnecessary. I will have a staff and droids."

The dean gave him an extraordinarily sour look. "You will rely on others to understand anything outside of Basic? How will you even communicate with the droids if you don't have Binary?"

With a strident voice that was as unsound as that of any mid-teen boy, he answered back with his rehearsed lines, "You would have me rely on others for anything outside the simplest scientific processes? How would I know the capability of my ships, my men, or the value of our research? If you think due to my ancestry that I will be an officer someday, then would it not be to your benefit to have someone such as myself sympathetic to scientific inquiry?"

She looked intrigued. "Where did you learn to speak like that?"

"I speak like a proper imperial citizen!"

She seemed to consider that, then dismissed it. "Well, your ancestry is the only reason why you're even here at the academy. As for engineering, your father would never allow it anyway." She turned back to the display she'd been reading.

His accent slipped as he balled his fists and clenched his jaw. "My father has no oversight of my education and never has. He cares about results. I deliver them. Aside from that, the less he sees of his bastard, the better. He doesn't have to allow what he never knows about!"

"Why do you want to be an engineer?" she asked, turning away from the display. "Your father will make sure your promotions are fast and simple. You'll be commanding in no time. Engineers will take your orders. You won't need to be doing the work."

"I want to work!" He practically yelled it. "I don't want to _cheat_. I want to get things _done_. Real things. Honest things. Things that matter!"

She gave him a lingering look, then turned and pulled up his application. She studied it. "You don't have the prerequisites for the engineering program. I see nothing here of your general education. You shouldn't even have been admitted."

He shifted his weight anxiously. "It was self-directed. All of it."

"Do you have records from the educational modules?"

"No, I don't have _records!_ That's not how it was! We changed ships all the time and I didn't keep them." It wouldn't help to admit he'd done many of them under assumed names, so even if he did produce records, they would be disallowed.

She looked unconvinced.

"You know my father's disdain for formal education, advanced scholarship especially." He put his hands on her desk and leaned forward, lowering his voice. "I know you don't like him. He doesn't like you, either. Or anyone like you. Can you imagine how upset he will be to find that his only son graduated with an engineering certification? A techie. A nerd. A databrain. Did you know he thinks of technicians as a cross between skilled slaves and over-specialized droids?"

She was listening. He kept talking. "This will never come back on you. The application came in to your office with all the boxes marked correctly. It was approved automatically. You might not have even seen it. I don't want to be ignorant the way he wants me to be. Do you really want another Brendol Hux following in his footsteps? Or would you rather someone different? This is your chance to hit him where it hurts."

Dean Mulhale leaned back in her seat, regarding him coolly. "Everyone says you're your father's instrument."

"I will be more than that," he said with all the fury of his soul.

She made up her mind. "You'll have to demonstrate the prerequisites, then. There's no point in wasting anyone's time on this if you don't understand the fundamentals."

"When?"

A hint of a smile played at her lips. "How long do you need?"

"One month."

"Then we shall see, if in one month, you can catch up to what the others have had ten years to learn."


	2. First Interview

**A/N: This is about a month or two after the Knights of Ren have met Snoke for the first time, which is shown in Knights of Ruin. It is six years before the events of The Force Awakens. Backstory for the Happily Ever After chapter 'Snoke Tonesetter'.**

* * *

Major Armitage Hux had been called from his duties without explanation, told to report to the _Eclipse_ for an interview with the recently elevated head of the First Order, a being called Snoke. His assumed title, 'Leader', was an odd one. The generic First Order rank for a leader was 'commander', used freely as a sign of moderate respect to anyone you had reason to believe was higher-ranked than yourself, but for some reason you didn't want to use their actual rank (or more likely, didn't know it and couldn't see their uniform, such as communication through audio transmission).

'Leader' was a component of the Army's 'squad leader' rank and the Navy had their own equivalent among TIE pilots. The technicians had project leaders, whose importance varied with the scale of the project. But no one had a 'leader' rank by itself. It was a lowly rank for one of his status to use. Why not grand admiral? Or even emperor, since that seemed more along the lines of what he'd been styling himself as in what little of the news and gossip Hux had cared to listen to about the matter.

But his opinions on the titles assumed by his betters were of no interest to anyone. Hux kept them to himself, arrived when and where he'd been told to go, and presented himself before Leader Snoke in dress uniform, on bent knee. Since he was not a direct report to the 'leader', he need not render a full and formal oath. Snoke, on the other hand, was not in uniform, dress or not. He seemed to be in loungewear. Hux managed not to so much as blink at that, but he certainly wondered about it.

"Sir," Hux said.

Snoke stared at him where he knelt for some long seconds before speaking. "Rise," he said finally. Hux stood. Without any other preamble, Snoke said, "Grand Admiral Rae Sloane informed me that you were the last legacy holder of the emperor's will, personally charged with carrying out his Contingency Plan by Gallius Rax, acting as the direct agent of Sheev Palpatine." He paused. "Is this true?"

"Grand Admiral Sloane was similarly charged with that duty."

"She is no longer with us." Snoke made a dismissive gesture with one clawed hand.

Now Hux blinked. "Sir, you speak of her as though she is dead." This unsettled him. He'd known Rae Sloane since he was a child. She'd stood up for him against his father – the first and only one to ever do such a thing. She'd won him surcease from his father's physical abuse for a few precious years of his youth. Even after, it had been Armitage's impression that Brendol had held back out of fear word would get to her that he'd returned to his ways. She'd been Armitage's protector and when he was older, his mentor. She'd told him who he could trust. Together with Thrawn, they'd carried the burden of the Emperor's last wishes. Hux had known she had left suddenly on a mission a few months prior, but that was all.

"I speak of her as though the operation of the First Order has been left in our hands. And so it has." Snoke looked away, eyes on the wall to Hux's left. While a brief glance would not have been notable, this one continued for several seconds. Hux followed the gaze, wondering if there was something there he was supposed to look at. Snoke turned back to him. "Do I bore you, Major Hux?"

"No sir." He made a last glance around the room, brows slightly furrowed as he tried to work out why Snoke would think he was bored. He was concerned. Shaken by the possibility Rae was gone forever and by Snoke's lack of a meaningful answer in that regard. But there was no way he wasn't attentive as required.

"Then do not let your attention … stray."

Hux turned his eyes forward, chin raised. So that was it – he had broken formation, let his leader's conduct and unexpected implication lure him into incorrect posture. But his leader's conduct was none of his business, as was, technically, Sloane's fate. If Snoke wanted him to look at the wall, he would have said something. Hux felt the irritating bite of unwarranted humiliation at being called on it, as though he was unable to perform the basic task of standing at attention. It was insulting.

He could, and did, correct the physical side. But the mental was harder. Gears were furiously turning in his head at the blatant hypocrisy. It was Snoke who appeared bored by him, or at least distracted. But Snoke gave no explanation for the obvious contradiction. And it wasn't, really, a contradiction. Snoke was in charge. He could act as he wished. Hux's job was to obey. It was always to obey – not to question, not to think for himself. That was what his father had said over and over: just carry out the tasks given to him. Snoke was clearly aware of this. The question was, why wasn't Hux?

(Or rather, why hadn't he done it? Was he being intentionally insubordinate?)

Without an explanation, Hux was left trying to work out his superior's motivations. Was this a test? Was it a physical disability of Snoke's? (If so, was he weak? Had Hux just signaled disrespect by calling attention to it?) Were the rumors about Snoke's powers with the Force true? Had he seen something over there? Or was it just some quirk and it was rude to bring it up?

Now Hux was committing the very sin he had been accused of. He was thinking of things he was not allowed to think of. At least, not here or now. This was, truly, insubordination. With an effort, he drew his _full_ attention to Snoke as much as he would have to one of his father's lectures. Snoke was saying nothing, just staring at him with a patient, accusing expression. Maybe a little disgusted and disappointed. Wishing to deflect from his obvious lapse, Hux asked solicitously, "How may I be of assistance, Leader Snoke?"

"You may start by not speaking out of turn."

That stung with a new wash of white-hot shame. He had, indeed, spoken out of turn. He was reminded that he had no authority, permission, or familiarity that allowed him to address one such as Snoke. Hux was there to be addressed, to answer direct questions, and perform as directed at the pleasure of his commanding officer. It reminded him a great deal of his father.

Snoke asked, "I had been told you were well trained …?"

Another stab of insecurity. His early training in particular had been haphazard, as had been clear to his instructors when he was finally enrolled in formal education at the age of fourteen or perhaps fifteen. Until then, his education had been whatever his father chose to pass on and whatever he'd been able to sneak past the ogre.

Brendol considered most education to be useless busy work compiled by those too indolent or cowardly to actually act. On ships, it had been easier for Hux to steal time on simulation units and in the archives, learning the things his father told him were irrelevant. But then his father had moved them planetside as he set up the academy that would oversee the organized training of officers, and the different schools the First Order required for workers and troopers.

Still not a teenager, Hux was put in charge of groups of students, supposed to be a role model for them while he still had large gaps in his own knowledge. The next ten years was a fury of cramming as he sought to be as good as he was required to be, as he was supposed to be. Yet the others had always known, finding the chinks in his armor with uncanny precision, laughing at him not knowing common things that every school-child was taught.

Or maybe Snoke was criticizing his military discipline. Perhaps he'd gone soft lately. Since Brendol had died, Armitage had been in charge of the educational programs. Surrounded by children, subadults, and teachers, he still worked hard to present an exemplary appearance, something for the younger ones to strive for. But had he lost discipline in the process? Was he what his father had always accused him of – soft, useless, oversensitive? Had he failed in his duty without his father present to bring him to heel?

It was galling to be seen through so easily. His flaws must be apparent for all. No wonder he'd been forgotten downworld, excluded from the rest of the Order and getting the attention only of a few.

Snoke went on after a long enough pause for Hux to consider his failings. "I have also been told that you have spent considerable time on a hobby interest outside of your assigned duties."

Hux did his best to look politely interested. He was dying inside.

"Thrawn told me about the megaweapon."

It was still not a question. So Hux could explain nothing. There was no defense to proffer in any case. Yes, he'd spent time on research that had nothing to do with his assignment. How was this different from the rest of his life, with nearly all of it spent in contravention of one rule or another? He'd used Order resources, which meant by definition that he had mis-used them. He'd even taken the time and attention of some of the top people in the organization to tell them about his ideas. It sounded so childish in Snoke's mouth, as though 'megaweapon' was some euphemism for 'toy'.

"Perhaps if you had not distracted them, they would still be with us."

Hux almost blurted out a question about what had happened to Thrawn, but he managed to swallow it down before it left his lips. Sloane was gone. Thrawn was gone. His two primary allies. Two powerful people who had given him advice, hope, a role in the Order. In their absence, 'Leader' Snoke had somehow deposed the High Command. All the rumors Hux had turned a deaf ear to came storming back to his awareness. He should have listened. But even if he had, what would he have done? What could he do … still? He looked at Snoke with an impertinent glare.

"On your knees."

Hux hesitated, torn between propriety (he'd always said he'd die rather than be at anyone's mercy like that), a desire to ask for clarification (surely Snoke hadn't asked him to disgrace himself in such a manner), and the need to obey. He had, after all, shown the proper respect immediately upon entering the room. Why shame him like this, with no one else in the room witness it? Somewhere in his soul, there was a bit of bitter, snarling defiance. Because of it, he intentionally misunderstood the order and went to one knee. That was when he found out what Force lightning was like.

Beyond the hot, coursing electricity was a deep, spiritual enervation, like his body was being shot through with poison alongside the pain. He didn't know how he ended up on the floor, but he was there when he became sensible. How long had he been out? His extremities were twitching. His gut was tight. Every sense strained in alertness. Snoke was closer than he had been before, peering down at him with an amused expression.

"Am I done with you, Major Hux?" His voice sounded sweet and pleased. He raised one hand languidly, the same way he had before. Primal instinct made Hux flinch.

He swallowed back bile and rage. He knew what that question meant – just how far did his disobedience run? Was he unwilling to follow orders intelligently? If that was the case, then yes, Snoke was done with him and Hux was done with himself. He'd be gone. Dead. With no more than a batting of Snoke's eye and maybe a slight jab forward with that extended hand. Hux pulled himself up to both knees as he'd been directed. A pregnant pause filled the air until Hux's rattled brain realized he'd been asked a direct question. "No sir."

"Your acquiescence proves you are aware of your deficiency. For your sake, let us hope this is a correctable problem." Snoke swayed forward a few more steps until he towered over Hux, as gigantic in comparison as Brendol ever was. Hux felt his heart rate increase and his breathing shallow out. He hated this reaction. Intellectually, he knew it was unhelpful. Also intellectually, he knew a half dozen better responses – fighting back, relaxing and letting it happen, staying calm, saying something placating or politic. But his body didn't care what his rational side had to say. His jaw ached.

Snoke inhaled slowly and raised his head, eyes heavy-lidded. Hux felt something slither through him, across his skin, playing the range of tastes and smells like keys of a piano, a weird, crisply modulating sound. He saw stars. He made a strangled, choked noise to find something, someone, in his body just as simple as that. Snoke stood apart from him, yet Hux was no longer his own. The expression on Snoke's face left no doubt of how he experienced the violation.

"Hands and knees," Snoke whispered. But it sounded too loud, like it should be echoing, like his eardrums should ache from the sound of it. It was inside his head, he realized. He went to all fours reluctantly, unable to see anything but Snoke's slippers from here. "Shut your eyes. You don't need them."

They shut as though of their own volition. A part of Hux wanted to scream. His body was not performing as he directed it and for once it wasn't an unthinking instinct or a nervous tremor. He couldn't get his eyes to open. It was like a nightmare, like he'd somehow, waking, wandered into a nightmare. His throat made another choked noise.

Something wormed its way into his mind, parting his thoughts and sliding its slimy form up against him in a palpable way. His face hidden from Snoke, Hux bared his teeth and tried to fight it off. Pressure bloomed across the front of his skull like a migraine. _You cannot resist me_. It was Snoke's voice. Inside him. He recoiled from it. That intellectual part of him noted that actually, he could resist Snoke. It might be ineffective, but it was possible. And obviously, it annoyed Snoke. Snoke hit him again for the insubordination. For even thinking about being insubordinate. The pain was so staggering that his arms shook and his eyeballs hurt. He gagged on the sound he wanted to make.

A switch flipped inside his head. When he could focus again, when he could put together enough thoughts to count as really thinking, he knew he was okay. In pain? Yes. Responding to that pain? Yes. But it was like an autonomous system was managing that reaction and the tiny, thinking part of himself had separated itself for protection. It hunkered down, unharmed, unchanged, letting the pain and violation and Snoke's slippers exist elsewhere. Armitage Hux, himself, was fine. That was kind of surprising.

He wasn't sure what Snoke felt about it. He couldn't see the creature's face, and despite feeling like most of his brain was blotted out by a foreign presence, he had no sense of what Snoke was actually doing or thinking. He just knew what Snoke did and that was to plunder every part of Hux's memory, his senses, and his bodily awareness.

It was systematic, harrowing, and brutally uncaring, alternately numb and agonizing. It was all Hux could do to not crumple entirely to the floor. He wasn't sure what he was supposed to be doing other than enduring this, so enduring it was what he did. Snoke tugged things out of his being like interesting items out of drawers, showing them to him before tossing them aside dismissively.

Pettiness, vanity, diligence, contempt, resentment, intelligence, bravery, dedication, idealism, cunning, ambition, obstinance, determination, ruthlessness, callousness, sadism … Snoke showed him pettiness again.

 _You see this?_

 _Yes, I saw that. Sir._ He had no idea how to properly show respect to someone who was tearing your mind apart, or if that was even required. He had not been allowed to show disrespect to his father even while being beaten by him, so he supposed deference was the correct behavior.

Snoke went back to it. He was taking an inventory, Hux realized.

Egotistical, inflexible, fanatical. Vicious. Ambition – Snoke showed this to Hux for a second time as well. Hux acknowledged it, as before, but made no other response. Merciless. … Bastard.

 _Mongrel of poor breeding_ , Snoke told him. _A defect in your father's choice of copulation partners. Cast-off genetic trash._

Some part of Hux wondered why Snoke cared about human bloodlines. But then again, his father cared about the lineage of his lycabirds. Others obsessed about the breeding of dogs or fathiers or even slaves. Perhaps that was it and he was no more than a failed prize animal contaminating the gene pool that Snoke was toying with.

Hux wasn't hiding, exactly, during this. He could not, after all. But he was subdued, both in the sense of being genuinely unable to retaliate effectively and, due to that, in the sense of staying quiet and trying not to draw attention to himself. Although that sense of his self did not change during Snoke's examination, it was still galling and humiliating to go through it. It was like being summarily stripped naked, put through one's paces on command, making an involuntary confession, and being quizzed on your greatest failings.

Snoke pulled up Hux's memory of standing outside his father's bacta tank on the _Absolution_ , watching the man die. Hux's breath caught in his throat. He lifted one hand, thinking to physically recoil, but he had not been ordered to move. He had no permission. His secrets were spilling out of him like water, into the hands of an alien commander. Hux had never had a sense so strong of not belonging to himself. He wasn't choosing to do this; it was just happening. This was the commanding officer of the entire First Order. He put his hand back down.

post/173625508855/the-effects-of-the-bite-of-a-parnassos-beetle-so

Snoke drew up detail after detail of that memory, and Hux had plenty of them. It had made a deep impression. He had told the med techs that his father was a 'survival of the fittest' person who believed in personal strength and not in artificial aids. It was true enough, but Brendol would have never meant for that philosophy to be applied to himself. Armitage stayed with him the whole time to make sure Brendol didn't receive any but the most basic treatment. It felt like putting his boot across Brendol's throat and slowly watching the life drain out of him.

He'd stood there in a welter of emotions as his father stared at him from inside the tank, barely conscious. Hux had been aware for the first time in long, numb years that he had emotions and was not some mechanical thing that followed his father's orders and exhibited erratic, malfunctional misbehavior with alarming frequency.

Snoke paused in the process of intensifying the memory of Brendol's death and instead dug into what Hux perceived as misbehavior. It was those unexplained moments when he'd disobeyed. His deviations were things like reading books, telling a well-placed lie to get a boy in trouble whom his father had favored too much, smashing his own datapad into pieces, and licking his own blood. They were deeply personal. Shameful. And now, known.

Then cavalierly discarded as unimportant. He could feel Snoke's disdain, both for the aberrance and Hux's childish guilt about it. It was irrelevant. Snoke's disregard left Hux feeling hollowed out – the things he'd hidden for years being seen as so trivial. Not even worth an eye-roll or a snort of disgust.

Snoke's attention went back to Brendol's death. Then Phasma's involvement. He methodically ran down every trace of criminal culpability, forced Hux to recall the evening he'd sat in the star room with a steaming cup of tea, watching them twinkle as he mentally catalogued the various laws and rules he was breaking in his father's undoing. Having worked out the consequences, Armitage had weighed them carefully and decided it was worth it. Snoke seemed to dwell on that.

Then it was on to other things. His father throwing a cupcake someone had given Armitage onto the floor and ordering him to eat it if he was such a baby as to still crave sweets. Beating him so hard Armitage soiled himself involuntarily, then rubbing his face in it. Breaking his door down to get to him, and then his furniture that he tried to hide behind, and telling Armitage to learn to fix things if he didn't want it to stay that way. Backhanding him time after time after he came back from the mission to Lothal, his nose bloodied, and his father wiping his hand off on the arm of Hux's uniform when it was dirtied by blood and snot. Something about that last – being so casually used as a cleaning rag, had gone all through him in a way that being told to stand and accept his punishment had not.

Vanity, Snoke showed him. He'd killed his father because he was vain and prideful. Full of himself. Falsely thinking he was his own man now that he'd seen proper military action and actually, for the first time in his life, had something legitimate in his past. Hux could not deny it. It seemed so trivial, so … petty. He was false all the way through and he'd murdered his father because of it, because deep down he was small and mean. Snoke showed him vanity again for a third time, this time with a sneer.

 _It is as I am_ , Hux thought sourly. He was not proud, but neither could he find it within himself to feel sorry for it. He'd been born this way or made this way, but either way – no one had asked him his opinion, nor did he feel he'd had any free will in the process. For anyone to criticize him meant they hadn't understood him in the least. He was merely an instrument. He'd always been only an instrument. All except those stupid outbursts that Snoke had already ruled as unworthy of attention. And, of course, deciding he was done with his father, which Snoke seemed to think had been done for laughable reasons.

Snoke rifled through the events of Lothal. Hux had killed two people, quietly, in the night. Then to his school days. He'd blinded a boy who'd lost a fight with Hux and two companions and then promised to tell on them. He'd helped kill three other children a few years earlier who had threatened and attempted to sexually assault him. He'd only been personally responsible for one of the deaths. He'd carved on that one after death, but found it unsatisfying. The bodies were never found, lost into the shallow seas of Lanson, the ones that teamed with predatory fish.

Snoke went further back, painfully yanking out memories that were equally painful to remember – beating a girl's face in, being sat on by a larger boy until he passed out from lack of oxygen, biting a man's hand, kicking someone (he didn't even remember who or why) in the ribs and feeling them break, blood on his hands, brains on his shirt, ozone and the vacuum of space and the whiff of engine grease and behind it all, the burning, suffocating dusty sands of Jakku and the sodden, chemical odor of the rebreathers they had to wear.

It was exhausting to remember. It felt like he'd been fighting all his life, for as long as he could remember. Sometimes he won, sometimes he did not. His earliest opponent had been his father. And his last. The six years or so following his death had not featured a single murder or even serious assault. Hux had had a few disagreements with deans on the Down planets and some tense confrontations with high-ranked parents over their children's standings, but it had been different without Brendol in his life. Calmer. Quieter. Enough time to pry into the secrets of the Jedi and try to find a way to bring ultimate victory to the Order.

 _I see now,_ Snoke told him. _Your fascination with this pet project of yours stems from awareness of your inability to prevent the deaths of your fellows at the hands of the Rebel guerillas on Lothal. You are vain and prideful to a laughable degree if you think you can single-handedly develop a weapon capable of wiping out all of your enemies in a single blow. This is no more than petty, vengeful overcompensation for your own acknowledged weakness and deficiency._

Snoke withdrew his mental presence with a shake. He gave an uninterested grunt and shuffled back over to his seat, reclining on it heavily. If he said anything, Hux did not hear it. He was hoisted off the floor by someone he hadn't even known was in the room. How long had that grueling session gone on? Had he passed out? Who was this person ferrying him out of the leader's presence? Was he being taken to be killed?

"Wait." It was Snoke's voice. Hux was pivoted by the person holding him. He got his feet under him and his chin up, regaining his bearings somewhat. He would stand unassisted if this oaf would let go of him. Snoke said, "Your duties at the academy are hereby terminated."

Hux swallowed. He felt a cold sweat break out across his skin and he pressed his lips together. His fists curled until his nails bit into his palms. The only position he'd held as an adult, the only adult job where he'd contributed and been productive to society aside from his single, brief deployment to Lothal, was over in the span of a few words from a creature he didn't know and had never met before today. Was he to be terminated as well? Demoted? Reprogrammed somehow? Would he even be allowed to return to his rooms and gather his things? The possibility of immediate death flitted through his mind again. Deficient. Weak.

"You have two days to submit to me a report showing the feasibility of your idea." Snoke's next words were indecipherable in tone – were they sarcastic? Genuine? Bored? Mocking? Amused? "I am very interested in it. You are dismissed."

And that was it. No option to speak, to ask questions, to know anything. What was he to do for the next two days? Where would he sleep? What tools was he allowed to access to prepare this report? What would happen if he failed?

The door whisked open and he stumbled as it shut behind him. The cessation of Snoke's oppressive presence was so palpable that he staggered and caught himself on the opposite wall. At the end of the hall, two officers saw him. They stopped, looked at each other, and walked away silently. Hux collected himself and his hat, then brushed himself off slowly. It seemed wrong that his body was untouched after all those memories of blood.

He felt broken and delicate. He had two days.


	3. Second Interview

**A/N: My apologies if this conflicts with whatever canon exists for how lightsabers actually work. Backstory for the Happily Ever After chapter 'Dirty Laundry'.**

* * *

A lightsaber was essentially a circle. Hux was sure that had some deep philosophical meaning to Force users, but he considered that bullshit. There were more practical elements of interest.

A lightsaber functioned by sending a beam of energy into the kyber crystal, which then projected it outward as dictated by the configuration of the crystal lattice. Color and other properties were determined by the presence of impurities and the precise arrangement of the lattice. Again, Force users ascribed all manner of mystical hokum to this, saying it had to do with personality and attunement. It was no better than astrology.

When the energy left the kyber, it existed mostly in hyperspace. This sounded thoroughly exotic but had no practical effect unless you contained it somehow or projected a great deal of energy that way. In order to contain it, lightsabers were equipped with regulators that warped the field, flipping the beam back onto itself at a distance set in the construction of the device. That distance dictated the length of the blade. The energy shot back into the crystal and due to the properties of kyber, cycled back out to create a continuous circuit that manifested as a field of hyperspace no wider than a beam of light.

That circuit was almost impossible to interrupt. Not even clashing with another, similar field would do it. It didn't have much of a loss rate, so the hilt of the weapon was a manageable size, assuming one didn't intend to run one's lightsaber for hours of continuous use. It would cut through almost anything that did not also exist in hyperspace. Powerful gravity fields could effect it, but by the time that happened, the wielder would have long since perished, or the hilt collapsed.

If you left the regulator off, then you had what amounted to a hyperspace beam cannon. It degraded rapidly in the presence of a gravity well and it wasn't as efficient as conventional weaponry. You only saw kyber used for weapons on capital ships or mobile bases like the Death Star. But the simple transmission of energy into hyperspace was useful for communications relays and ship navigation systems. There were synthetic crystals used for cost reasons when one could get away with it, but nothing matched the real thing.

Hux's idea was to take this beam of energy, ramp it up to absurd power levels, and project it through a focusing collar _at_ a gravity well. Like, say, a planet. It was the opposite goal of previous kyber weapon development, where great effort was put into minimizing the effect of gravity on the beam. If enough energy was channeled that way, the beam would travel through hyperspace the same way a ship did and, just as a ship, would fall out of hyperspace after gravity deflected it sufficiently. You couldn't use it to target ships (unless they were the size of planet), but if you wanted to blow up entire planets, then this would work fine. It became a feature instead of a bug. Even the developers of the Death Star had not been crazy enough to make a weapon which could _only_ be used to blow up entire planets.

How to convey this to a being like Snoke? Hux's life depended on convincing him it would work. He had no idea of Snoke's level of technical expertise, but he did know Snoke could use the Force. It seemed reasonable that he would be familiar with lightsabers and how they functioned. Using the lightsaber as a starting point for the discussion seemed, also, reasonable.

As it turned out, Hux's father had happened upon a cache of laser swords in the personal chambers of Emperor Palpatine, on his flagship, the _Eclipse_. They were probably leftovers from the execution of Order 66, but who they'd belonged to originally mattered not. All Hux cared about was that he'd inherited his father's assets, these among them, and he'd been toying with them off and on for several years as he refined his ideas for Starkiller.

They were nothing special to him – less useful as weapons than the blaster he routinely wore on his hip (it was a regulation part of officer's dress uniform) or the knife up his sleeve. He'd worn both to his first interview with Snoke. He wore both to the second. But he was also carrying a lightsaber hilt in his hand. Armitage Hux strode into Snoke's sanctum with the determination of a man intent on leaving the room alive no matter what he had to do to achieve that.

He never again saw the look on Snoke's face that he did that day, as though for a moment, Snoke realized he was looking death in the face. It was only a moment, a quick flash of expression that Hux had seen before on humans right before they died, as they realized what he was up to. It was so unexpected – with Hux's thoughts having been solely focused on the presentation he was about to give – that he stopped as soon as he saw it.

For a long moment, he and Snoke stared at one another. A slithering feeling coiled around Hux's mind, foiled by the inscrutable mechanics of hyperspace projection and gravity well calculations that he'd been dwelling on. The presence dug for something more. It was wary. Suspicious. _Afraid_.

Hux looked down at the lightsaber hilt, remembering in a flash something he'd read (and dismissed) about the symbolic importance of such a weapon to users of the Force. It had a meaning that didn't apply to a blaster or a knife. The thing he had in his hand (because his belt did not come equipped with a ring to hang a lightsaber from, nor was he going to attach one for the single time he needed to show it to Snoke) was not a tool. It was a symbol of power. It occurred to him that he might as well have walked in with his blaster in hand, finger on trigger, and pointed directly at Snoke's head.

He probably should have dropped it. Instead, he looked back up at Snoke and his grip tightened. If he had a thought, he couldn't remember it. Force lightning took him out, just as it had the first time. When he woke up, he was shaking, drooling. He'd wet himself. The lightsaber was in Snoke's hand, who was studying it with casual interest.

What happened next ended up being the most agonizing use of the Force he would ever endure. Snoke ripped open his mind and sliced through everything he was. Snoke was careless in doing it this time, letting his intentions be known more clearly than he had the first time. He sought Hux's motivations in entering the room, dismissed them as trifling, and moved on to pull up everything Hux knew of this lightsaber, lightsabers in general, the Force, Emperor Palpatine, and what else Brendol had scavenged from the estate of the late ruler of the galaxy.

Hux gave up everything, because there was nothing else to do. Information was stripped from him like a thin rope yanked from his hand when he wasn't expected a pull. He didn't even know he should have been gripping and if he had, it would have only burned his skin. Once Snoke had that much, he slowed down. He crawled back through Hux's expectations of today – the presentation, the calculations, the showy display he'd practiced of how Starkiller would work by waving around the lightsaber and talking through it, hoping to keep Snoke's attention with theatrics.

Snoke laughed. It was a good joke. He threw the lightsaber at where Hux had picked himself up to a huddled, angry crouch on the floor. He glared at the hilt where it stopped in front of him.

"Pick it up," Snoke said in a taunting whisper.

Was that an order? Or a challenge? Would he die if he did?

At this point, his urine cooling on his pants and his brain on fire, muscles still spasming, Hux didn't give a damn. He picked the thing up. He was angry and desperate, as much as he'd been that time he'd bitten a mouthful out of his father's leg, twenty years before. If he was going to die, then he was going to go down fighting. He got to his feet, nose wrinkled, chin raised. Unsteady, because his legs kept wanting to buckle.

Snoke's brows rose. He looked amused. "Impressive. The First Order has something of worth in it after all." The praise stiffened Hux's spine. It also gave him second thoughts about charging Snoke and trying to use a blade he had no experience with. Did he have to fight? This was his superior officer. Theoretically, he shouldn't have entertained the prospect at all, but there was a vicious animal deep inside him that cared more about survival than duty. His grip tightened again.

Snoke knew about that animal. "But it won't for long." He raised his brows in theatrical surprise. "Are you going to challenge me?"

The stupidity of what he was doing flashed through his mind – picking a fight with a prepared opponent who had proven twice now that Hux was powerless against him. The whole High Command had apparently bowed before Snoke. There was no way he could fight this. Even backed into a corner, kicked, abused, made to foul himself, and aching in ways he didn't even know he could hurt – there was no way to fight this invisible thing that took him apart with such ease. It wasn't even his duty to fight it. Hux knelt and set the weapon hilt on the floor between them, backing away from it like it was a bomb. "No sir."

Snoke drawled, "Then get on with it. You came here to give a presentation. I am waiting."

Hux swallowed roughly. He blinked and started to breathe again. He tried to pull his thoughts together. It had been a very long two days – no sleep in it, but enough stims to keep him going – the beginning of a six year off-and-on addiction. He turned his mind back to his point in coming in here, which was to get out alive. That involved the presentation. He swallowed again, raised his head, and began.

* * *

The walk back from the interview was the worst. He shook so hard he could barely stay upright. The corridors felt like they were spinning around him. His equilibrium was shot. Many people looked at him, most askance but a few with pity. He was alive and he didn't care about their looks. He was thankful his dark uniform hid his loss of control and got himself to his quarters as quickly as he could. It was a full day before he could bring himself to come out. But he had to. The Starkiller project had been authorized and he'd been promoted to colonel. It was time to get started.


	4. Screening Process

When Hux entered the room, Snoke was standing at a viewscreen, flanked by two tall, purple-robed persons. Or creatures. Their proportions didn't look human, he realized as he approached. His familiarity with aliens was limited enough that he had no idea what these were. He chose a middle distance to stop at. He'd been called here, barely having started on plans for making the megaweapon a reality. He didn't have anything to show at this point but lists of ideas, options, and a growing list of questions that only Snoke could answer. So maybe it was a good thing that he'd been called in.

One of the purple creatures made a chittering moan and pointed at the screen as though showing something. The star field zoomed in to show a lighter band of grey through the middle. The device automatically added boundary lines and data that showed it was a particulate field. Probably a hazard to space travel. Possibly a source of minerals, but if the information Hux was seeing was correct, mining it would be inefficient unless the mineral in question was impossible to find in larger deposits.

If Snoke was speaking to the creature, Hux wasn't hearing it. But the thing nodded and pressed a button on the control panel. The bottom half of the screen filled with data. Hux was too far back to make out the text and besides, it wasn't his business.

Snoke was still facing away from him, reading the screen, when he said, "You checked yourself into medbay yesterday."

Hux blinked a few times. Why would Snoke care? How did he know this? How closely was Snoke monitoring him? And why? Also, how was he so sure Snoke was addressing him? "I did."

"I did not ask you a question."

What a jerk. Hux started to apologize, then kept his mouth shut. He questioned, again, how he was so sure Snoke was speaking to him and not either of the creatures with him. But he was definitely sure of it. It was puzzling.

"What treatment did you seek?"

It passed through Hux's mind that he ought to refrain from answering and pretend that he'd assumed Snoke was addressing the purple-clad aliens. But he recalled how he'd been treated after similarly misinterpreting Snoke's direction for him to go to his knees. Answering seemed wiser. Snoke could always tell him to shut the hell up if he was out of line. "Sir. I was seeking an antispasmodic."

Snoke turned to him. "For what purpose?"

He glanced at the alien assistants, who were conferring in strange tones. They were facing one another and not seeming to pay attention to his overly personal exchange with Snoke. "I … was having indigestion." His bowels had been unable to take the emotional strain he'd found himself under. It was one of the last things he wanted to talk about with a commanding officer. Or anyone. Snoke knew he'd gone to the medbay, but it was interesting that he didn't know why.

"Is this an effect of our last meeting?"

"I wanted to get started on the assignment as quickly and efficiently as possible." Which didn't explain why he'd sulked in his room like a frightened child for a day. He'd been weak. And then disgusted that his own body was betraying him. So he had taken actions to rectify the situation. It wasn't really a lie, he supposed. Snoke stared at him. Hux decided the look was because he hadn't answered the question. "Yes." Then he amended, "Yes sir."

"Hands and knees."

Hux knew what he meant. He shot the two aliens another look. There was also a warrant officer at the door whose job seemed to be seeing people in and out. He didn't want any of them to see him like this, but he hadn't been asked his opinion. Hux knelt.

This sort of posture happened so rarely in the Order that to see it at all was a laughing matter. No one laughed. For the aliens, maybe they didn't know. For the officer at the door, maybe she had been told not to. Or she'd seen it enough in the few months of Snoke's presence in the Order that it was no longer funny. Hux suspected it was the latter, which was loathsomely depressing. Why was this creature in charge?

He didn't have time to ponder it. His skin crawled, like something was moving over the backs of his hands. He grimaced and shifted then, picking up one and then the other, making a fist and setting them back down. He felt that pressure in his head, a feeling that Snoke was staring at him, a feeling of dread.

 _Hold yourself still._

 _Yes sir._ He assumed Snoke could hear what he was thinking. Again – something he didn't have time to ponder. The feeling repeated on his hands, buzzing against his palms like he was touching machinery. It marched up his arms like he was dipping them into a mild acid, burning against his skin. It felt wet and then stung. He wanted to jerk his hands from the deck and frisk himself. He didn't. He stared at his arms where he could see nothing at all but felt it all the same.

He let out a shuddering breath as the pins and needles sensation flowed over his chest and down his body. No portion was left untouched. He squirmed anyway when his private parts were touched, then gasped as it felt like someone put a spike through his hands. They twitched, tendons standing out in relief as his muscles locked. Another spike. His fingers and toes curled at the pain. He bared his teeth and panted, trying desperately to hold perfectly still. Because he knew that was what the pain was about. He'd been told what to do and he wasn't doing it. Once he was still again, the process continued, starting at the same intimate spot where it had left off. There were a lot of nerve endings there. It took too long. His eyes watered.

Then legs. Feet. Face. He gasped, then set his lips together and tried to freeze in place. It felt like someone was touching his eyelids. A bug. The tip of a knife drawn across his skin. A spray of liquid. Residue. His scalp was next. That actually felt good, which was sickening. It sent his skin into gooseflesh. He wanted to object to this treatment. He wanted to complain. This was an offense, a breach of conduct. It was improper and people were not allowed to handle someone else like this, not even a commanding officer. But Snoke hadn't so much as touched him. Anyone could see that. Everyone could see that.

Then … his tongue. He swallowed compulsively before he could catch himself. He was tasting things. Or at least, his tongue was telling him he was tasting things. He was smelling them, too. It was like every smell or taste he'd ever registered was being evoked in a quick review, many of them mashed together. He felt nauseated. He couldn't tell if that was a reaction to the experience or a shift in Snoke's attention, but Snoke's attention did in fact shift. Hux had not been on such familiar terms with his gut as he was shortly. Snoke lit up every nerve cluster there in succession, putting them through their paces.

Hux wobbled, realizing the reason he was on hands and knees might be to prevent him from falling rather than any desire to humiliate him. He might still fall, but not as far. At the moment, he was on the edge of puking. The rest of his anatomy was similarly examined. He clenched. His vision faded. His hearing oscillated. His balance shifted. The room spun. He had to move to catch himself. It was either that or fall. He found himself with elbows bent, face inches from the floor. Had Snoke caught him with the Force or had he caught himself?

Snoke was walking away. Someone had come in. The purple-clad aliens were gone. Hux again had the feeling that too much time had passed. He had not been told to rise, so he stayed there on the floor, listening while Snoke discussed furniture options for some room. Snoke wanted to be sure they understood that alien accommodations were important.

Then he returned. Or Hux thought he had, yet Snoke continued walking past him to the console the aliens had left here. He pressed a few buttons and commed Admiral Nayta, whom he asked about her planetary survey results. Hux assumed Snoke must be making a point that he waited at Snoke's pleasure. And that was fine. He would wait. It was better to be here and be ignored than to be the center of Snoke's attention.

But when the call with the admiral was over, Snoke turned to him. Hux felt again various sensations of pain, heat, chill, nausea, what he would have sworn was heart palpitations, his throat itching, a desire to sneeze. His ear canals ached and so did his teeth. The whole experience was giving him a deep revulsion toward his own body. It was like it wasn't even his. He wanted to strip off this traitorous flesh and get rid of it.

"Your body functions within acceptable parameters," Snoke said dismissively. "It is the mind which is lacking in discipline. This seems endemic in the First Order." He looked off to the side, eyes sliding out of focus for long seconds. Hux swallowed and kept himself fixed in place. This time, he didn't look at whatever Snoke was gazing at. Snoke turned back to him. "If you wish to manage this project, you will learn to manage yourself or I will destroy you and find another."

The death threat didn't faze Hux nearly as much as it probably should have. After the preceding days … well. Instead, Hux thought about how he _had_ managed himself. The medication had done its job. Was Snoke telling him not to use it further? What of the stims? Did he require Jedi-like asceticism in his people? What did Snoke expect him to do here? He was a human being and he was not _asking_ for his body to react this way!

"Leave my presence." Snoke sounded put out, which was oddly validating. Snoke turned back to the new console as Hux stood and left. Hux gave the woman at the door a solid glare as he approached her. She at least had the grace to look away. He seethed internally all the way out about his obnoxious boss, who'd called him in to humiliate him over a standard human biological feature and then give him a complex about it.

As for the rest of what had happened … he vomited in the next refresher he came to. He had reason to continue using the antispasmodics and made a mental note to add an antiemetic to his regimen. He locked the incident away in his mind like it had never happened. He didn't know how else to deal with it. He had a project to finish scoping. He buried himself in his work.


	5. Onboarding

"Leader Snoke's chief of staff, please." Hux waited as the automated system connected them.

"This is Veska." It was the same person who had coached him through expectations for his first meeting with Snoke, although she had not mentioned the possibility of Force powers or mental violation. Hux frowned at the comm unit. Also, she'd called herself a liaison at that point, which wasn't even a formal title. All of this irregularity was very irritating.

"Colonel Hux. I have matters to discuss with the leader's staff in regard to procurement and resources allocated to a project I've been assigned. Who would I need to speak with?"

There was a long pause. "That would be … Lieutenant Chenwin. I can transfer you."

"I just need time on his schedule. Anytime tomorrow would be fine."

"Our schedules are not finalized. He's available at the moment."

"I'm on the _Absolution_ 'at the moment'," Hux said with annoyance. "Would I be correct in assuming he is on the _Eclipse_?"

"Yes sir."

"Will he be available in the hour or two it will take me to arrange transport and come immediately?" Not that he wanted to. He'd intended to eat dinner, get out of uniform, and maybe go for a swim or something that involved a lot of sensation so he wouldn't keep thinking things were crawling on him.

"I'm sorry sir, I don't know."

"That's not acceptable. I am a colonel. That should mean something, including that some staff lieutenant will make time for me."

"I'm sorry sir." In a slow voice, she said, "Leader Snoke's requests come before all others."

"Has he requested this lieutenant's time tomorrow?"

"He may, sir. Or the time might be available. Do you wish to come tomorrow, sir? I will notify Lt. Chenwin as to your expected time."

Hux breathed out heavily. He lowered his voice. "We're not in the middle of wartime. Even generals understand that their staff has to have time to interface with the rest of the organization. That's what the staff is there for – to filter requests and information so the leader's time is not absorbed with minutia. Does Snoke want me going to him personally on these matters?"

"You may. I would not suggest it. No, never mind," she caught herself. "It's not my place to make recommendations. I can reserve time on Snoke's schedule if you wish."

"No, that is not what I wish! You are not a droid! I only want to have some questions answered-" He made an exasperated noise at what Snoke was doing to the First Order. This was not how the High Command had conducted things. "Fine, transfer the call. I might as well just talk then."

"Yes sir."

A few tones signaled the routing of the call. Then: "Chenwin speaking."

"This is Colonel Hux. I have been assigned a project by Leader Snoke. Have you been briefed on it?"

"Yes sir. The kyber weapon?"

Hux's brows drew together. "Yes, I suppose that's accurate enough. All I've been given is a general goal in making it work. I need other information." He paused, wishing he was there in person to read Chenwin's expression. "Do you know Snoke's idea of a timeline for this? Ten years? Twenty? A hundred?"

"I … wouldn't know, sir. He has not shared that with me."

"Well, has he shared an idea of budget? Scope? Resources? Ships? Staff? Anything?"

"He has said that this was one of three primary goals for the Order. Resources will be allocated appropriately."

"Three primary goals? How can you have three 'primary' goals? That's ridiculous. It's like having multiple things as the highest priority." Hux scoffed. "And what does 'allocated appropriately' mean, anyway? That still doesn't tell me if I have a ten year project or twenty, or if I will have any of what's needed to get it done."

"What will you need?"

"That's the thing," Hux huffed. "I won't know until I have an idea of what he wants accomplished. Right now I need other scientists to review what I've come up with and help with drawing up requirements. This may well be the single largest undertaking the Order has ever attempted. I don't know what these other projects are, but for this to work, we need endorsement at the highest level."

"Our master has been very clear that your project is a top priority."

"'Master'?"

"Yes. Leader Snoke."

"But you called him a 'master'? The First Order doesn't have masters. Slaves have masters." Hux laughed openly. This was a joke, right?

"Yes sir."

It wasn't a joke. There was something in the man's tone that shut Hux up instantly. Slaves have masters … Yes sir. These were dangerous thoughts. "Thank you, Lieutenant," Hux said after a long pause. "Would you happen to know if your master has time to see someone like myself this evening? I have questions I believe only he can answer."

"I would not know, but I can transfer you back to Veska to find out."

"Thank you." Hux's voice was icy. "Please do that."

* * *

Hux paused at the door to Snoke's office, chambers, or whatever he was calling it, a few moments before his appointed time slot. He really should have learned his lesson after the previous three sessions. He wanted to spit in the creature's face. He wanted to pick a fight. He wanted to prove he wasn't Brendol's whipping boy any longer and he wasn't about to be Snoke's. (Though he'd already been … and here he was about to walk in to a fourth session.)

He wanted to prove the First Order, and all those students Hux had recruited and trained, weren't going to be Snoke's slaves. (Yes, the Order had slaves, but they were a small percentage of the population and the status was generally earned by misbehavior. _He_ wasn't a slave and he wasn't going to be one.) His father had not built this organization for it to turn into this!

It was a poor frame of mind to be in. Before he finished his thoughts, the door slid open. He was beckoned inside by the warrant officer Snoke was using as a door attendant. Hux composed himself as he approached. "Sir."

Snoke gave him an arched brow and a displeased look. "In future, you will preface all requests for my time with an agenda so my staff can gather the necessary information prior. What is it you want?"

"I-" Faced with Snoke's mood, Hux found his voice failed him. His heart was beating too fast. He took a couple deep breaths. Snoke tilted his head with a disapproving expression. That prompted a surge of irrational anger in Hux, mostly at himself for being afraid. It gave him his voice back even if his upper lip twitched upward as he spoke. "I need answers on the project I am to undertake, primarily on your desired timing and available budget." He reviewed his words. They were acceptable, although his tone left a great deal to be desired. With an effort, he sealed his lips over his teeth so he didn't look like he was snarling.

"Had you requested this audience properly, the information would be available."

"Well, yes, but your staff has no better information than-" Hux flinched, hit with a wave of pain that was visceral and breath-taking in its intensity.

"You speak out of turn, again. And beneath your words is a criticism of my rule. Would you like to speak these words out loud?"

"No." But he would think them. Snoke couldn't take that from him unless he killed him.

"Then think them. I will listen." Snoke leaned forward attentively.

O-kay … maybe Snoke _could_ take that away. Hux was pretty sure that thinking treasonous, rebellious, murderous thoughts right in front of a mind-reader would get him killed. He wanted to stab the guy. He really, really wanted to stab him. But he knew he wouldn't get a single step. He clenched his fists and tried to direct his thoughts back to the questions he had about the project. The project was what mattered. Bringing victory to the Order was what mattered. Fulfilling his charge, his duty, and his oath – none of which would be furthered by getting himself killed.

"Good, good." Snoke leaned back and smiled as pleasantly as he could manage.

The praise was unexpected. Unasked for. It tasted poisonous. Hux drew in a shaky breath. He was disgusted by how hungry he was for such toxic affirmation, but he allowed himself to be pleased by having gained it. Even if it made him feel like a bootlicker. Or slipper-licker, he supposed. He looked at Snoke's slippers and wondered where he got them. They weren't First Order issue. Somewhere in the Republic?

Pain again, but not nearly as bad. He winced and jerked, staring at Snoke with a resentful snarl. Was that just … for nothing? Like Brendol, to prove he could?

"I will be reading your thoughts frequently after your mishap with the lightsaber. You would be wise not to question things outside your purview or to linger on your hate. Go. I will have the information you require sent to you after I have deliberated on it."

* * *

Hux argued, "You can't simply deny the realities of the-" Snoke batted him to the ground with some telekinetic application of the Force. Hux continued to speak as though it hadn't happened, because he was too stubborn to not to finish what he'd started. "-timetable. If you would-" This time he was interrupted by mind-splitting agony, an impression that continued until Hux felt his consciousness retreat into himself much as he had the first time he'd met this monster.

He felt like he was outside of himself. Fine. He'd been interrupted. Snoke had proven his point. Hux tried to decide if he was sorry about having pushed it that far or not. He didn't think he was. He wished he'd just pass out and get it over with.

Snoke sounded bored. "I will not let you slip into unconsciousness. There is no such escape."

It ended. Slowly, Hux pulled himself to his knees. Inexplicably, he still felt like giving Snoke a hefty piece of his mind. But he kept his mouth shut and struggled to police his thoughts, which were mainly along the lines of insisting Snoke couldn't merely deny reality whenever it suited him. Just because the Force allowed him to warp reality near him didn't mean it was going to magically speed up the entire project to completion in a ludicrous five year span. Not simply because Snoke wanted it to. No amount of torture was going to change this. He wanted to shout it and make himself be heard. But these were non-constructive thoughts.

Also, he hurt. Badly, even by Hux's standards. His joints ached and he'd probably pulled muscles. There was a third option, which was to tell Snoke what he wanted to hear, short-term, and then try to hide or escape longer-term. Which was dishonorable, despicable, and Hux thought he'd rather die than live with that.

But that didn't keep the thought from being there. If he was going to be hurt this much … at a certain point, he knew torture would elicit anything at all from a person as they attempted to get the torment to stop. He didn't want to be at that point. It would get him killed and he'd deserve it. It was a conundrum. He needed to contemplate it at some point when he wasn't kneeling and shaking at the creature's feet.

Snoke rolled his eyes. "Leave me and consider this situation, then, and come back when you have found a solution. Do not require me to summon you."

Hux had a sense he meant his conduct, not the timeline. Even though his traitorous mind still wanted to argue about the kriffing timeline, reality, and the Force. He wanted to ask, to make Snoke say explicitly that their method of working together was more important than the schedule, but that would be a) delaying, b) argumentative, c) possibly get him hurt again, and d) actually not true. Also e) it was the opposite of what he was just thinking so kriffing yes, he was just being argumentative. He could tell this rationally, but he still wanted to cut Snoke into pieces.

If anyone needed to be schooled in accepting reality, it was him, he realized. So Hux stood. He bowed stiffly. He said sincerely, "Thank you, Leader Snoke. I will return shortly." He left.

* * *

Hux returned. He stopped in front of Snoke, who had been wearing an unamused look the whole time Hux approached him. "Sir."

"Speak."

"The construction of the megaweapon is a project which will require direct oversight by the leader of the First Order. As such, the project lead for that should report directly to you. Although I have been promoted, my chain of command has not been clarified in the intervening few days, nor my position relative to my peers. This lack of structure … is unsettling. I would ask that you transfer me to your staff or otherwise make it clear that you are my direct commanding officer. I would then provide you with the respect appropriate for that position."

Snoke pursed his lips and regarded him for a bit. "It sounds as though you are attempting to extort a further promotion."

It was not a question, but Snoke made a gesture inviting response, so Hux said, "No, I am not. I am attempting to regularize our relationship."

Snoke tilted his head. "All this … fighting … has been due to bureaucratic pettiness? I do not wear the appropriate stripes on my sleeve to garner your deference?"

Hux decided not to sugar-coat it. "Yes sir."

"And this 'solution' will solve your behavior problems?"

"The important ones."

Snoke looked skeptical. Hux blinked and tensed as he felt that wormy presence in his head, sorting his thoughts and making him feel small. He had hoped Snoke wanted an actual solution and not just an instrument to abuse him with further, which was all any list of escalating punishments would have amounted to. His obedience was based on the assumption Snoke was working for the betterment of the Order as a whole. Even though Hux was still in his twenties, he understood that might be very subjective. He was prepared to give the matter a lot of leeway. Snoke had seen his rationales for killing his father, so hopefully that was enough. If it wasn't … well.

Snoke sighed. "I suppose I should not be surprised. You are everything I accused you of being: petty, vain … obstinate. Very well. I will see to it. What else?"

Hux waited a beat, pulling himself together. He could do without the frequent invasions of his very being, but it seemed imprudent to ask for that. Instead, he went back to business. "In regard to the timetable you have proposed for the project, I ask your permission to approach others about it so that I have a better understanding of how best to achieve our goals." Meaning – he still thought Snoke was full of shit, but he wanted to get a second or third opinion on it before saying it to Snoke's face again.

"Granted, without limitation. There is no need for the level of discretion I see in your mind. This weapon will not be built in secret from our own people – only from the Republic, from whom we hide our very existence. I will review your progress in one week's time, by which point the administrative minutiae that you feel so strongly about should be complete."


	6. Orientation

**A/N: Four scenes where Hux works on how to make the project feasible and how to recruit people to help him.**

"Hello? Colonel Chabren?" There was only one person in the lounge who fit the description Hux had been given – an older near-human woman with greenish-black hair and a colonel's rank. She nodded at him and gestured to the empty seat next to her. He settled in. "I'm Colonel Hux." (He did like having that rank.) "Thank you for coming to meet me. I suppose Dean Mulhale described me?"

"She did. You've been assigned to some high-level project?"

"Yes. That would be the case. I have been tasked with developing a super-weapon that may, if my preliminary calculations are correct, be an order of magnitude larger than either of the Death Stars. The dean said you were the only person she knew of in the Order who'd had any association with them."

"Them?"

"The Death Stars, as construction projects."

"Ah." She shrugged. "It wasn't much in the way of association. I was on a destroyer that did patrols during the early construction, but we were rotated out toward the end. I was stationed elsewhere when the battle happened."

"Well … you're the best I have. My questions are general."

She took a drink and tipped her glass at him. "The dean said you were buying. So ask them."

He nodded. "I have looked at the imperial records. The basic information is undisputed – that at one point the Death Stars weren't there. Then they were. There is a demonstrable number of years they must have taken to fabricate in between." He sighed. "Snoke wants to see this current project completed in five years. I'm trying to find out how feasible that is."

"What if it isn't?"

"Then I will tell him that."

She raised her brows. "I have heard he does not respond well to people telling him he can't have what he wants."

"I can tell you from personal experience that is indeed the case."

She tilted her head and took a drink as a server droid came to the table. "I am cheered that you are still with us, then. It disproves the rumors."

"Hm," Hux turned to the droid and reviewed the standard choices it came pre-loaded with. "Whiskey, neat. Put her drink on my account as well." It beeped acknowledgement, produced the beverage, and trundled off after he provided it the appropriate code cylinder. He sipped the liquor. It was about the same quality as his father's preference. "I suppose the rumor is that telling Snoke what he doesn't want to hear results in instant death?"

"Not instant, but yes. Supposedly, he's killed a few people in grotesque manners in front of others as an example to the rest of us."

"I don't doubt it. He does seem the type." He gestured to himself. "But as you can see, I am whole." He was resentful about that. There was not a scar upon him nor any visible injury he could point out to someone. But things had been done to him, things he preferred not to think about and he certainly wasn't going to admit to. "Back to my question – is five years ridiculous?"

"You want it be, don't you?"

"If it is, then he has no use for me and if I'm lucky I'll get to go back to my previous post. I strongly suspect I won't be lucky."

She leaned forward. "I'm not an engineer. I don't build things. I never have. But I can tell you that no one, _no one_ , expected the first Death Star. Part of why the Rebellion happened is because no one believed it even existed. I'm sure there were rumors. But until Alderaan blew up and even for a while after, no one could wrap their mind around it. It was too big to have been built in secrecy."

She leaned back. "Then the second one. The Rebels believed it by then, but they never imagined it was that far along. What I can tell you is that it happened fast. Jerjerrod was a miracle worker and that was before Darth Vader showed up. I have been told production sped up even more after that." She dropped her voice. "Don't tell anyone I said so, but don't ever underestimate the Force."

Hux snorted. "That has nothing to do with it. I highly doubt Snoke will be involved personally. And besides, what can a few parlor tricks do? They might play a role in hand-to-hand combat or one-on-one encounters, but not a project of this scale."

She shrugged. "Believe what you want, then. What I'm saying is, if everything comes together just right, then things can be accomplished that nearly everyone in the galaxy thinks are impossible."

"Things never work right."

"Maybe so. You get the Force involved, and sometimes they do. Every blaster bolt you shoot at one of them magically hits their lightsaber. You fumble, you trip, you run into things. Your orders get misunderstood, somehow you steer your ship into another, the failsafe systems fail. You've heard the stories, right?"

"Tales to frighten children." He couldn't scoff, no matter that he wanted to. Too many of the older generation believed it for it to all be bunk. Hux wanted it to be. He shuddered at an unwanted formication on his back. "Like I said, parlor tricks."

She was unfazed. "Now imagine the opposite – everything works just right. Even when you make a mistake, it turns out to be the right thing. Happy accidents. Serendipity. People do the right thing without even being told. They're driven. Enthusiastic. Proud. Nothing breaks down, no malfunctions, no injuries, no slowdowns. That's how the Force works. If Snoke can turn that sort of power to the Order, then we will defeat the Republic."

"There has to be a limit to what he can put his attention on. I've seen him distracted."

"You asked me if it was ridiculous. I don't know that kind of thing. But I do know that when the Force is involved, the ridiculous can become reality."

* * *

"Boxy?"

"Yep?"

"Thank you for taking my call."

"Anytime, Armie. What'd'ya got?"

Hux smiled at the comm unit. The list of people he would tolerate being called such from was very short. Perhaps singular. Mitgann Boxbea was a disarming fellow and always had been, Outer Rim accent and all. "I have some questions about managing large-scale production jobs. You handle the installation for all the prefabricated bases the Order uses."

"Ah-huh? Yeah? You building uh … what'd'ya building? 'Nother farmworld maybe?"

"No. A planet-sized Death Star."

A moment of silence. "What for?"

"To blow up all our enemies at once."

Boxbea laughed like that was a good joke. "Yeah, right. So, uh, why?"

"Why are we building it? I already said."

"No, no. I mean, why … well, never mind. What did you want to know?"

"If I needed to finish such a project in five years or less, how would I best go about it?"

"Five years?"

"Yes."

"Hrm. Can you start with a Death Star-sized planet and just put a big gun on it?"

Hux was quiet for a moment. He hadn't thought about that. He'd been thinking of building the whole thing from scratch. But if he didn't have to … then why should he? "Yes," he said slowly.

"Good. That's way easier. How big a gun are we talking? Pew-pew or big bang?"

"Well, it's the reason I said planet-sized. It needs to be rather large."

"Rather … large." Boxbea chuckled. "Got it. You always were a fan of understatements. Your Dad – the opposite. If he said he was going to have fifty thousand students, he ended up with ten thou instead. So. Are you … you gotta give me more, here. Details, kid."

Hux rattled off dimensions and parameters. At the end of it, Boxbea said, "Your main problem is just excavation. That and building a superstructure. You need bots for all of that. Self-replicated construction droids. I got some contacts with what used to be the Techno Union I can hook you up with, maybe a few mining corps. But you gotta know those bots don't make themselves out of nothing. You'll need raw materials, more of some and less of others depending on what they can extract from what they're mining. You can't just turn 'em loose and walk away. You gotta stay on top of things."

"The droids?"

"Yep. You said five years, right? The only way to do something that quick is to throw money at it. Tons of money. Which means droids. You're not going to just drop three units on there and wait, either. You'd need to seed the place over and over. Come to think of it, you'll likely need to tap every mining company that will take your call if you're trying to hollow out a whole planet in five years."

"I thought you said the droids self-replicated?"

"They do, but do you have a grip on the scale here? A planet? In five years? You gotta go big." He paused. "Speaking of which, do you really have a planet-sized gun you're gonna shoot at the bad guys? Serious? Or are we just talkin' here?"

"I don't have one yet. But I will."

* * *

"Yes," Hux said into the comm after the standard identifiers were exchanged. "Please connect me with Operations Manager Daviosa Drewmill. I'll hold. Her staff is sufficient. If she's not available, I can book a time."

Several minutes of silence passed, which was not surprising. Even using hyperspace communications, she was several relays away. The shipyards she managed were not in the Unknown Regions so as to reduce the chances of outsiders working out the location of the First Order's core worlds. It was an arrangement that led to certain inconveniences, but was necessary given the flow of raw materials and occasionally outside engineers and scientists which were funneled to their ship-building operations. He rubbed at the bridge of his nose and reviewed his lengthy notes.

A crackle on the line told him a connection had been made. "Davie here." Technicians were often less formal about names and ranks than the military.

"This is Colonel Hux. I am-"

"Colonel?" she asked sharply.

"Yes."

"Ah. Kay. I thought you were a general."

"No, that's my father. He passed away some years ago." He considered saying something about the persistent lack of 'sir', but it seemed unwise when he was calling to ask a favor.

"Oh. He did? Sorry. I'm out on the edge of nowhere here. What's going on?"

"Yes. Well." He moved on to his prepared statement. "I've been put in charge of a large-scale fabrication project for the Order. I've heard of your work in setting up the Kuat-Entralla shipyards and overseeing construction of the Resurgent-class star destroyers. I would like to have the benefit of your expertise in suggesting possible team members I might include on my project."

"Ah. I … I wish I could help you, but everyone I thought was decent has been roped into my own 'large-scale fabrication project for the Order'."

"What would that be? More star destroyers? I would think that project would be mature." It was, after all, why he was calling her.

"Yeah, it is. But we're finishing out all the existing shells and then no more. Next up is a mega-class star dreadnought. Just starting the design phase."

"What … what is that? I've never heard of a mega-class."

"It's new. The goal is to take all the manufacturing capability we have in the Order as a whole and double it, building it all on a single, massive ship. Snoke's flagship."

"It's … a warship?"

"Not really. I mean, it will have guns, sure. But it's a mobile base. It's to be the new capital of the galaxy someday."

"Capital of the galaxy? That sounds rather ambitious." Hux had a sudden thought. "What is your timeline for completion of this vessel?"

"Four years. We start as soon as we push this last set of destroyers off the docks."

"Four years? Not five?"

"No. Why would it be five?"

"My project is five. You'll be finished a year before mine. Snoke … has a plan." Missing his deadline would not only mean his own project was in trouble, but it would likely have ripple effects on the entire Order. 'Capital of the galaxy'. Snoke was putting a great deal of faith in these projects. It wasn't a collection of whims, but rather a coordinated effort.

"Yes," Daviosa said. "He has to. I wish I had five years instead of four. It's going to be tight as it is. The drive yards are already howling. I'm sorry, but you're going to have to go poach your team from somewhere else. If they're worth their tubes on ship-building, then I've already got them locked down for me."

"It's just one ship. Four years for one ship?"

"It's a big ship." He could hear the grin in her voice along with the pride. "Do you have any idea how much detail work is involved in this? This baby's going to support millions, along with everything it takes to keep them going forever. It's not supposed to be simply space-worthy, but finished out. That's a big deal, Colonel."

"Surely you've already worked most of this out on the Resurgents. The whole point of them was to obliviate the need for resupply on staples."

"Yeah, we have. That's why I'm hanging onto my people. They know how to do this. They're not going anywhere unless Snoke says so. And trust me," Hux could hear the smile in her voice turn unfriendly, "I'll fight you on that. Your people make the team. I've got the best ones in the Order and I'm keeping them."

* * *

"I need help putting together a team." Hux sat in the office of Manager Avedann, Personnel Specialist. A warrant officer, essentially, although technician ranks didn't neatly cross-reference, especially when dealing with the upper levels of a specialty.

"How big a team are we talking about?"

Hux pushed over the list. "To start with? A few hundred." Her brows climbed. She tilted the screen to review it. "Eventually, thousands," Hux said quietly.

"What are you trying to accomplish?" She looked at him with confusion.

"A Death Star. Or rather, a star killer. You see, we take negative energy from a stellar body and transform it into a phantom state, then project it through a focusing collar into hyperspace-"

She held up a hand in surrender. "I'm not technical. I do people. Not the other stuff."

He scowled at being interrupted, immediately wondering if he was wasting his time here. "I need you find me people who do that 'other stuff'."

She blinked at him blankly for a moment, letting the pause hang between them before saying, "I can do that."

There was something about her delivery that made him wonder what someone with twenty years experience in the First Order's most horrific personnel situations might have seen. Hux decided he not only didn't want to know, but might have come to the right person after all. He smiled thinly. "Good. Are you able to take on a project of this magnitude? I know the Order is in 'transition' at the moment and I'm sure that falls on your department as much as any."

"My department's first priority is providing the appropriate support staff to Leader Snoke. But I've heard your project mentioned. There is an awareness that it will have staffing needs of its own." She set down the datapad. "Do you have anyone pre-selected?"

"No." He noticed she wasn't answering his question. "You see, the ones I've consulted with in the past about this project were on the staff of Thrawn or Sloane and they're both _gone_. The best minds outside of that have already been assigned to other projects. I'm sure Snoke isn't looking for second-string. If you're telling me I'll be competing with him for resources, I would appreciate you being blunt about it."

"No, Snoke is not looking for second-string. He has very particular requirements though, which exclude many who might be good candidates for you."

"What requirements are those?"

"You were selected by him."

Hux's brows drew together slightly at how vague that was. "Yes. And?"

"For obvious reasons, Snoke is a bit lacking in a human touch. His initial screening process is difficult to pass."

"Oh." Hux blanched as he remembered that first meeting. He leaned back, as close to physically recoiling as he would allow himself. He recalled also what Colonel Chabren had said of some people not surviving dealing with him. "I understand."

"So." She moved on briskly. "Are you open to recruits from outside the Order, or is this internal only?"

"Any. I've already been in touch with a prefab installation contractor we've used for some of the Downworld structures. He's an old friend of the family and discreet. But I haven't approached him about hiring. We'd need complete confidentiality for the entire term. After that, well, we'd have to see. Permanent recruits are best."

"Have you talked to the Downworld governor or the council of deans about recruiting out of their graduating class? That's another group Leader Snoke isn't interested in that you could use. With a project this important, you could pick whoever you wanted."

He nodded. "I honestly hadn't thought about them, but you're right. They train well. I'm very familiar with their qualifications. There are a few I've already worked with on small things or been an advisor to them."

"When do you need these people?" She pulled over the datapad and looked at it again. "This is a good list. Very thorough. I might make a few additions."

"Now, if possible. Everything needs to be in place in five months. The clock is ticking. I've already spent precious weeks reaching out to those I knew and defining the scope. It is clear to me that if I spend all my time recruiting people, then I don't have any time leftover to work with them." He paused for a moment. "I can't do it all myself."

She looked up at him over the datapad and smiled thinly. "None of us can."


	7. Job Site Issues

**A/N: Using the dark side of the Force to open hyperspace tunnels is a Legends/non-canon ability. But I don't have any misgivings about assigning such a talent to Snoke.**

 **Cheskar presents as gender ambiguous.**

 **This chapter is set a couple months after the preceding one.**

"That's it?" Hux leaned forward, looking at the wire-form projection of the planet he'd been 'given'.

Veska nodded. They were in Snoke's audience chamber, but the leader himself was absent, off on some other work or perhaps it was off-cycle for him. Hux assumed Snoke slept and ate like anyone else. He'd been called here to receive the latest information – Admiral Nayta's explorations had revealed the planet Snoke was having her look for, which would be turned over to the megaweapon project for their use.

Hux stood and circled the table, crossing behind Cheskar, the other team member he'd brought with him. Cheskar was rapidly becoming the chief engineer rather than the adjunct they'd been hired as, with Hux finding himself pulled too many ways to consider himself the primary even on something as critical as how everything was going to come together.

"Look at all the kyber," Cheskar said in amazement, reading the text that hovered just above the table.

"Where is it?" Hux asked.

"It doesn't say, but probably deep," Cheskar answered.

"I don't mean the kyber. I mean the planet." He turned to Veska. "Where is it?"

"The coordinates-" she started.

"I don't care about the coordinates. Zoom out. I care about where it is in relation to everything else."

She tapped a few buttons. The view shifted. The planet reduced to a small, bright circle surrounded by hundreds of faint specks.

Hux looked at the various nearby stars, trying to find a landmark or something to give it context. Cheskar was still reading the geological properties under the planet. Hux said, "Zoom out again." She complied and Hux finally saw a few labeled systems he recognized. He leaned his hands on the table. "This? This is where he wants us to build the weapon? It's out in the middle of nowhere!"

At Hux's ending near-shout, Cheskar finally looked up at the multitude of stars and markings floating overhead. "It should be easy to keep it a secret then."

"Of course it will be easy to keep it a secret!" Hux said, shoving away from the table and pacing as he ranted. "It's already been kept a secret! You don't have that much kyber lying around unknown and unharvested on any planet within striking distance of a hyperlane! But how long does it take to get there? This could ruin the whole project!"

"All that kyber has to be worth something," Cheskar said reasonably.

"Blast the kyber!" Hux yelled at them. He turned to Veska. "What's the transit time?"

She looked suitably taken aback by his outburst. "Um … um, it took Nayta, ah, three months to …"

"Three months?" Hux yelled at her, then turned to Cheskar. "Three months? In a destroyer? A star destroyer? Probably one of the new Resurgents! Three! Months!" Cheskar looked confused. Hux put a hand on the table and leaned toward him. "Do you know how long it will take a freighter to get there? With all our supplies? The cargo ships with construction droids? The struts and prefab units we have to attach engines to and fly out like they're ships? Do you know how long it takes _them_ to get there? More than three months! I did not build this sort of transit time into the timeline!"

Cheskar blinked and looked back at the projection. "Oh."

"Oh? Yes! 'Oh.'" Hux mocked him. "It won't work. I don't want his useless planet! Even the Downworlds have an iceball in far orbit that would be a better choice."

"But the kyber-" Cheskar started.

"I don't care about the kyber! Why are you so obsessed with that? They're just rocks!"

Cheskar finally raised their voice. "The weapon won't work without them!"

"Yes, fine," Hux said with airy sarcasm. "So we send a mining expedition to this planet Leader Snoke has so kindly informed us of. We mine the kyber and come back, leaving that insignificant dirtball out in the middle of nowhere where it belongs!"

"We could put engines on it and fly it here," Cheskar said. Hux stared at them like they were daft. Cheskar said, "We were planning to put engines on it anyway. We have to unless it's in a multi-star system and we're fine with never taking more than two or three shots with it."

"Cheskar, I know that! But how would we get the engines out there and built and affixed to a superstructure such that the whole planet won't crumble into dust as soon as we activate them, without the sort of full-scale engineering process that's inhibited by the blasted thing's location in the first place?"

Cheskar folded their arms over their chest and frowned, but their tone was reasonable when they said, "Good point. It probably wouldn't move very fast anyway." That was part of what Hux liked about Cheskar – they were rational and willing to weather Hux's emotional volatility instead of reacting to it.

"We find another planet-" Hux started.

"Has to have a ferrous core," Cheskar said.

"That's not rare. But yes, it puts out the iceball. There are plenty of other options. We pick one near transit lanes. We have this thing mined," Hux pointed at the holo, "and we can make the schedule. There's no way to do it using _that_ as our candidate. We're still going to have to rearrange things and hope the mining turns up crystals of the configurations we need, and not just a bunch of shards or trace."

In a quiet voice, Veska said, "This is the planet Snoke said you were to use."

"Oh, sure!" Hux said with a bitter laugh. "Give me another five years on the timeline and maybe, maybe! I can do it. Without that, there's no point."

"We're going to use it anyway," Cheskar said to Veska. "We'll use the kyber. That's 'using' it. We'll just build the weapon part somewhere else."

The look Veska gave him was like Cheskar had calmly suggested testing a blaster's battery pack by pointing it at their head and pulling the trigger. Hux had his own experiences with attempting to re-interpret Snoke's orders. He wasn't about to try to get that past him. Hux said, "I have to brief him on any significant changes to the project anyway and this will be significant. I'll tell him."

"You should probably wait until we find another candidate world, so he can approve that at the same time," Cheskar said.

"No. Sooner the better," Hux said. He crossed his arms over his chest and hugged himself, staring at the pulsing marker for the planet Snoke had sent out most of the fleet to find. "Today."

* * *

"Leader Snoke. Thank you for your time on such short notice. I was shown the planet you designated for use in the megaweapon project. The characteristics," he swallowed nervously before continuing. "It's too far away from any transportation routes to be of use beyond mining it for kyber. I believe that-" He couldn't speak. His throat had seized.

Snoke leaned forward, the fingers of his right hand moving in a slight pincer motion next to him. "Perhaps my agent was not clear. That is the planet you will use."

"Awb, eck." The pressure released. Hux coughed, cleared his throat, and stared at the table in front of him for a few moments before raising his eyes. He was sure his expression was resentful.

Snoke said, "You think I would devote the resources spent on finding this world on a foolish whim? Your insolence is an insult. Your lack of faith is a deliberate provocation. Out of all the planets in the galaxy, my sight found this one and you will use it!"

"If I use that planet, the project will fail to meet schedule!" He didn't mention the budget, because Cheskar had a point – that much kyber would catapult the Order into being the richest organization in the galaxy if they played their cards right. "If the project fails to meet schedule, then the Order fails. That's what you told me! You will kill me if this doesn't work!" He was yelling at his superior officer. It was … well … not wise.

Snoke rose to his feet. Hux rose higher, by virtue of some telekinetic grip on his throat that lofted him off the floor. His body was not designed to be supported like this. His spine felt weird. His tongue and the soft tissues of his throat crowded into his mouth. Snoke said, "You will do the job that has been set before you and you will understand that the performance of that task is my will. Whether it includes your death or not is for me to decide, not you!" Snoke threw him aside like he was a doll.

Hux rolled and flopped in an ungraceful, undignified manner. He dry heaved, swallowed bile, and brought himself to hands and knees. He focused on breathing. And then cringing, as Snoke stalked over to loom above him. Snoke snarled, "You demand this treatment from me as though you enjoy it. You are inured to anything less after your father's failed efforts to bring you to heel."

Hux felt a hate for Snoke that knew no bounds. He rocked back on his haunches and raised his head defiantly. For that moment, it was like the entire galaxy made sense. He knew his place in it. He felt the ebb and flow of everything. It was a power within himself – a power he could use, somehow. If only he had any idea of how to get a grip on it.

Snoke raised his brows. "Your passion," Snoke paused, leaning down to peer at him as Hux tried not to tremble at Snoke's direct attention. He could feel that presence in his mind, but it wasn't painful this time. It was just there. "For this project," Snoke continued slowly, turning his head, "is laudable."

Their eyes met. The fear left Hux. He stared up into intelligent, piercing blue eyes that should have filled him with terror, but instead he felt nothing at all. Even the hate had fled, like it had been suctioned out of him. In that emptiness, his intellect remained. This mortal creature was close enough for him to eviscerate. But he needed Snoke. Even void of emotion, he wouldn't give up. People, children, the Order itself – depended on him faithfully fulfilling his duty.

Snoke half-stifled a snort of derision and moved out of reach. "Treacherous beast. Even as a husk, you would be a thorn. You are an idealist and a fanatic."

Hux felt a slow shock as emotions flowed back through him with Snoke's departure. He could feel himself shaking inside. He assumed he'd just been the target of yet another Force power. A truly dark part of himself wondered if he could ask Snoke to do that again, more permanently, and spare him the hell of feeling. But no – he was too much of a 'fanatic' for that.

Snoke chortled as he shuffled further away. "Ah, you are weak. Without me, you are a laughingstock – a dangerous sport of your father's that the others would do away with faster than I would. Why do you think your talents were being squandered on Lanson Down?"

Hux had no answer for that. Years had passed there – years of doing nothing, accomplishing nothing – it seemed. They had been years of indolence, of not having anyone like Snoke or Brendol driving him on, of seeing the rejects of the Republic find a new home, to grow and flourish in a prosperity Hux had never known as a child. Years of research and coming up with this weapon, as well, so something useful had come out of it from Snoke's point of view, he supposed.

"The weapon is nothing but an empty boast without _me_ ," Snoke said. "Your legacy, your destiny, is reached through serving _me_. You will do as I have commanded. I give you no other choice."

The air left Hux. He let his eyes drop to the floor. It was depressing. Words like 'legacy' and 'destiny' meant nothing if the planet was so far away that it took half a year to get supplies to it, much less back from it. This was a direct contradiction of his mission. He could not continue blithely toward failure, but he didn't know what else to do – as Snoke said, he had no other choice. His duty was in conflict.

Before Hux could contemplate finding another way, Snoke went on, "I will not be stopped by mere distance. I will create a hyperspace wormhole to link our shipyards directly to this world. Your project will continue as planned."

Hux looked up at him, blinking. Snoke was some steps away, a third of the generously-sized room, and facing the table as though addressing it instead of Hux. Maybe he hadn't heard Snoke correctly. What he had heard made as much sense as if Snoke had claimed to be able to magically teleport the whole planet into orbit over Coruscant. One did not just 'create' a wormhole when convenient. That such a feat might be within Snoke's powers was both humbling and terrifying.

"What? Sir?" Was he allowed to ask that? He wasn't sure, but the words were already out of his mouth. He was still crouched on the floor, so hopefully his groveling posture would save him from punishment.

"It will be done tomorrow. Now leave me. I must prepare myself."


	8. Kick Off Meeting

**A/N: Hux's timeline for the Starkiller project is five years from the date of the kickoff meeting. The chapters before this represented the five to six months that he had to pull together a team, a schedule, and finalize the design of the base. Hux is incorrect about the third 'first priority' project. That would be Kylo Ren, but Hux would never imagine one person was as important to Snoke's plans as Starkiller Base, or the** _ **Supremacy**_ **.**

The meeting was drawing to a close and none too soon for Hux's desires. Snoke had been listening silently, but much of the time, the expression on his face was unpleasant. Of the major projects the Order was undertaking, Hux had been familiar with only his own and Daviosa Drewmill's. Hearing about the others had been interesting. As far as he could figure, the third 'first priority' project was espionage and information about the Republic. He couldn't be sure as there were other contenders that had been presented, and as well, the project might not be openly discussed. He certainly wasn't going to ask.

It didn't matter. But Snoke's expression did. It had Hux worried. The lack of comment seemed like a very bad sign. After the last speaker sat down, it was Snoke's turn to address the group and wrap up. From his first words, Hux saw that his concerns were valid.

"We have hardly begun, and yet I am already disappointed in the performance of this team," Snoke said. "You are no longer under the command of your equally flawed peers, who might not notice sloppy work and lack of focus. You are under my command now. I will start by removing those unable to get through a simple project review without letting their thoughts wander in boredom."

There were a lot of darting eyes. Hux had paid close attention to nearly everything because he was trying to ferret out the third priority project. It was an idle curiosity, beyond which he couldn't say he cared too much about what the rest were up to. At the moment at least, he wasn't one of the guilty.

"You." Snoke turned to Chief Production Manager Bosh, who sat to Operations Manager Drewmill's left much as Chief Engineer Cheskar sat to Hux's left. But it put Bosh next to Snoke, who was addressing him. "Should I inform the rest of the table of your appraisal of their physical attractiveness in relation to one another? The details of your ranking system for such?" Bosh swallowed and his eyes widened. Obviously, someone hadn't gotten the memo they were working for a mind-reader.

Snoke went on. "Or should I instead discuss the ways you have abused your access to confidential communications channels to keep up on Republic sporting events?" Bosh was pale and stiff. Hux realized after a moment that he was too stiff. Something was amiss. Bosh's eyes began to bulge. Then he sagged forward suddenly, apparently dead and at least fully unconscious from the uncontrolled way he collapsed to the table.

Snoke made a backhand gesture at him. Bosh's body and his chair flew back violently, knocked halfway across the room. The motion was accompanied with a strange screeching noise that couldn't have come from either. It was a shocking sound. All of them jumped. A woman at the other end of the table went so far as to leap to her feet and flee. She stumbled and slammed head-first into the wall next to the door, with enough impact to crack her skull. She crumpled to the floor.

"Does anyone else wish to admit their behavior is beyond repair?" Snoke asked in a mincing tone.

Everyone else was silent. They sat very straight in their seats – at attention, every one of them.

"Drewmill?" Snoke said. His tone was plain and uninflected.

"Y-yes sir. My b-, my …"

"Listen to me," Snoke told her. "Your team does not take their assignment seriously enough. They believe that because it is similar to their previous work, that they need not fully apply themselves. You will correct this."

"Yes sir." She spoke much more strongly now that it was clear she wasn't next in line to be murdered.

"Good. Also, you will never again bring someone to my presence who is not appropriately focused on advancing our cause."

"Yes sir."

Snoke made a lazy hand wave at one of the two black-clad guards who had hitherto been inexplicably present throughout the meeting. The person wasn't all that physically impressive as far as size and build went. This did not reduce their lethality, Hux knew.

Snoke said, "This is one the Knights of Ren. They are Force users from the far side of the galaxy, given over to the dark arts. He will accompany you back to the shipyards and observe your conduct in my stead. You are to meet with each of your top staff, in front of him, and apprise them of the necessary change in attitude. I will recall him when it suits me."

"Yes sir."

He turned to Hux. "Colonel."

Hux had never wanted to be ignored so much in a meeting as now. "Sir."

"Do not think I did not notice that your projected delivery date for the first construction droids is that it will be _late_. The project is only now starting and you are already expecting to be behind schedule _._ Why?"

"The, um," he swallowed, "the shipment time was not included in the lead time that I based my estimates on."

"You were _wrong_!" Snoke shouted.

"Yes sir."

"Shut up!"

Hux swallowed the 'yes sir' that almost disastrously popped out of his mouth.

Snoke continued. "It was a beginner's mistake because you are a beginner. Are you aware of that?"

Hux hesitated, 'shut up' warring with a direct question. But Snoke was waiting for the answer. "Yes sir."

"Were you aware of that before?"

"Yes sir."

"Then why did you not address it?" Hux looked at him in fear and uncertainty. How the hell was he supposed to address something like that? The only way to gain experience was to gain it. Snoke sneered. "That is a dangerous incompetence and I will not tolerate it again. Get better people on your team! The current ones are children! Like yourself! And them!" Snoke gestured at Cheskar in continuing ill-temper.

Hux shot the briefest look at Drewmill, remembering she'd refused to spare any of the most experienced project managers the First Order had available. But it was a brief look. Because on the other hand, one of those managers was dead on the floor behind her. Hux would rather deal with a rebuke than a death.

Snoke went on, "Be thankful that you had the courage to report this blemish to me now rather than after the delivery date was missed. You have time to rectify it. Do that and I will forget this happened." Snoke turned to the others at the table. "Take this as a lesson to the rest of you."

The rest of what Snoke had to say was pointed at others. Hux tried to pay attention to it, but he'd already exhausted his options on asking or even begging the supplier to ship early or ship by faster vessels. He wasn't sure what he could do.

* * *

Cheskar at least had the prudence to wait until they were alone in the lift before blurting out, "He killed Bosh! Did he kill Bosh? Or was he just unconscious? Did he- It looked like he- what …?"

"Probably," Hux said. He surveyed Cheskar with a critical eye. They were fresh out of the academy, top of the class, and just happened to be especially fascinated with megastructures. Hux had considered himself lucky to add them to his team, rather than losing Cheskar to Drewmill's big ship project. Cheskar had been likewise happy to join. A new group meant immediate promotion rather than having to prove themselves over long years. But they were young. Snoke had a point.

"Probably?" Cheskar blubbered. "Probably which? He just kills people? Right in the middle of meetings?"

"Apparently. He looked dead to me."

"Apparently? How do you know?"

Hux looked at them askance. "You've never seen anyone who's dead? How did you get out of school without that?"

"No!" Cheskar gave him a look like he was insane.

"Ah. Technician training doesn't cover that sort of thing," Hux reminded himself.

"Officer training does?" Cheskar continued to sound alarmed.

The lift doors opened on their level. "It should. Obviously." Hux walked out. "I need to reassess our team."

"You need to …? What? That's it? He kills two people in a meeting and you're just going to go-"

Hux slapped Cheskar across the face. "Pull yourself together. That is my superior officer and I am going to do what he told me to do. We're not in private anymore. Mind your tongue." There was a pair of other officers in the hall coming toward them. They said nothing, but obviously they had ears.

Hux glared at his subordinate until Cheskar said, "Yes sir."

"Good." Hux turned and headed down the hallway. Cheskar fell in with him. "Just because we don't have some Force-user shadowing us everywhere and reporting back doesn't mean we were given a pass. We have to figure out how to get the droid delivery back on track. They can only get here so fast, though."

Cheskar reached up and rubbed their cheek sullenly. In a low voice, he said, "You could get Snoke to make another wormhole from the base to the droid company's doorstep."

Hux gave Cheskar a side-eye. Quietly, he said, "That's a good idea. I thank you for it. I don't know how difficult it is for Snoke to do that. Or if he can collapse them later."

Cheskar stopped. "Does it really take them that long to get here?"

He stopped as well. "Yes."

"Are we sure?"

Hux considered it. "Well … I don't know. They said it did. Should we question that? How do we question that? Who would know?" A mouse droid skittered past his feet. They both watched as it took a typically circuitous path that mouse droids always took – this direction, then that one, then a wide, sudden loop to avoid the feet of a pair of stormtroopers patrolling the hallway.

Hux and Cheskar looked up at each other at the same time. Cheskar said, "They're going the long way around."

"I'll bet they are," Hux agreed.


	9. Motivations

**A/N: A day after the kickoff meeting. Wookieepedia tells me, "Although he [Edrison Peavey] regarded his commanding officer [Armitage Hux] as an example of nepotism and incompetence, the Imperial veteran was a professional officer who kept his opinions to himself."**

"Captain Peavey." Hux greeted the man as Hux stepped off the shuttle ramp.

"Sir." Peavey said properly enough, although there was no 'welcome' that should have accompanied Hux's first steps onto the ship Snoke had assigned for his use in the megaweapon project. It meant Hux was the commanding officer now, or would be as soon as they finished the administrative details. Maybe that was why there was no welcome. Peavey's eyes were wandering around Hux's face a bit more than usual. Hux was used to people staring at his hair – the rest of him, not so much.

"Is everything in order?"

"Yes sir." Peavey hesitated a moment. Hux raised his brows and tilted his head forward in invitation to speak. Peavey added, "You're just younger than I was expecting, sir."

"Ah." Hux straightened. It smacked of Snoke's reprimand about his team's youth. He was sure this particular aged captain had been chosen to offset this. He gave Peavey a quicker once-over himself. The man was old. In his fifties, perhaps more. "Let me guess – you have children my age?"

Peavey cleared his throat. "I, I do. I have grandchildren, as well."

"Are they my age? The grandchildren?" Hux ribbed him, heading toward the hangar bay exit since Peavey hadn't taken the lead in doing so.

"No, of course not!" Peavey caught up with him in a few strides.

"I don't know. You look old enough …" Hux looked over at him, thinking that was a good joke, but apparently it cut too deep or Hux had delivered it poorly. Sometimes he thought he should just keep his sense of humor to himself. Peavey's face flushed, his lips pressed together, and he said nothing. Hux rolled his eyes at the man having started the age thing and then being oversensitive about it. "Are they aboard ship?"

Peavey huffed. "Yes sir. Most of them."

"You have many children?"

"Six, sir."

"Ah. That's quite a family. Certainly doing your part to increase the ranks of the Order."

"I am. They had breeding bonuses back then, did you know that?"

"I had heard that," Hux said. He wasn't sure what Peavey was getting at by mentioning it. "Congratulations?"

Peavey nodded as though that was the right response. "Do you have any – children, sir?"

"No." He thought of all the thousands of children he'd seen processed into the Order's training programs – usually hungry, confused, and frightened. Kind words, calmness, and a friendly smile warmed most of them up some. Food, shelter, a sense of belonging, and a promise of stability and structure took care of the rest. _They_ were the reason the First Order had to defeat the Republic – depose and destroy the corrupt government, bring order and stability to the galaxy, and bring prosperity such that no children were in such abject poverty that the Order was all they had.

It was certainly more than he'd had when growing up. He would have killed for what the Order's recruits received, and done even more for the life Peavey's children probably had. Peavey's many offspring had been raised right here in the Order, in the sort of privilege Hux had envied, but had no rights to. Brendol had arranged it that way on purpose. Peavey looked like the sort of man who would have used his influence to make things easy and smooth for his people. He was plump. He looked soft. He would have never struck his children.

Well. All Hux needed was for him to fly the ship. The faster they got moving, the faster they'd get to the Order's eventual victory. "We need to get underway for our first mission. Did you read the brief I sent over?"

"Yes sir," Peavey said slowly.

"Am I misreading you, or do I hear a certain hesitation in your voice?"

"It was an unexpected change in subject."

"Our work should never be an unexpected subject."

Peavey blinked at him. "Of course, sir."

Hux sighed. "We're clearly getting off on the wrong foot here. Just – have you read the brief? What are your thoughts on it?"

Peavey cleared his throat and assumed a posture Hux had seen often enough before – an older man preparing to school a younger on how things were to be done. "You are proposing to use my star destroyer as a cargo vessel?"

"Yours?" Hux said, stopping in the hall to face Peavey. If Peavey thought he'd get to condescend to him, then he had another thing coming. If they were going to be starting on the wrong foot, then Hux decided it would be boots and he'd just go ahead and jump in with both of them. "It's been assigned to me."

"It's been assigned to your project, for defense and protection of the project site."

"Until those droids are delivered, there's nothing there to defend and protect. If anything, your very presence there may draw unwanted attention that there's something there worth looking at."

"But … my orders-"

"I'm giving the orders here." His upper lip twitched. "I'm taking the Finalizer to the pickup point where we will transfer cargo and proceed on our own. It shaves a week off the freighter's unnecessarily roundabout route that they take to avoid pirates. We don't need to avoid pirates; they will avoid us. We can go straight through."

"Hauling freight?" he said with disgust. "Why don't we just escort the freighter?"

"Because we move faster than they do at sublight and they won't fit in the hangar bay. I've already checked."

"In all my years, I have not-"

Hux interrupted him again. "If you ever stood in front of Leader Snoke, then you would understand. But you have not. So you don't. Things are no longer as they were in 'all your years'. Now get us underway! You can ask all the inane questions you want once we're moving."

Captain Peavey stiffened at the insult and the order. "You're not even signed on. Sir." What he meant was that Hux wasn't technically in charge of anything until the formalities had been seen to. One didn't just turn over command of a star destroyer without some paperwork.

"We will do it in hyperspace. Give the order to get us underway, now, or I will adjust the chain of command and deal with the consequences." Hux put his hand on his blaster, making it clear what he meant. Under normal conditions, it was a gross and bizarre overreaction to Peavey's desire to stick to proper protocol. It stung because it was the sort of complaint Hux himself might have made in Peavey's place. He didn't like what he was being forced to become.

Peavey eyed him. "You're as much a madman as your father."

Hux knew a capitulation when he saw one, but he didn't take his hand off the grip of his blaster. "You should keep that in mind."

The captain gestured to make sure Hux didn't misinterpret him turning his back and walking away. "Comm unit's there." Peavey walked over to it, contacted the bridge, and gave the necessary commands.


	10. Charity Work

**A/N: Mild warning – discussion of disaster situation and famine, and the effects of such on infants, small children, the population in general, etc. Possible parasites and body horror.**

 **For those new to Grey Order, the Downworlds, the Downs, Lanson Down, Epsom Down, etc. refer to a binary pair of habitable planets (Lanson and Epsom) in the Unknown Regions that the First Order uses for raising, training, and educating people. The planets are dotted with schools and academies which specialize in different ages and/or curriculums. Hux's father was in charge of the place until his death. Armitage continued to work there for six years until Snoke showed up.**

 **This chapter is set about nine months after Snoke showed up. So it's been 2-3 months since the official kickoff on what will become Starkiller Base. Hux was given the project and six months to assemble a team, timeline, and get everything staged, then the kickoff meeting happened. He has five years to complete the project from that kickoff date.**

From Grey and Complicated, "Rey and Hux Talk It Out", chapter 22:

"Where do you think the First Order finds all of these slaves that we train into citizens who become workers or troops?" … He continued, "We're nearly all pure human and no planet in the Unknown Regions has a native human population. What remnants of the Empire that formed our core certainly didn't reproduce that quickly and I have refused to go the route of clones so long as there are such recruits available.

"Why do you think I have such disdain for the self-righteous, hypocritical lies spewed by the New Republic? When I have millions of their children enrolled in my training programs, when every day I see the sons and daughters of their people, treated like trash, thrown away for a few credits and sometimes not even that?" His voice quieted, "Sometimes, Rey, they're given to us, especially after war. The poor and the desperate of the New Republic sold us their children in the hope they will have enough to eat, that they would grow, learn discipline, and bring justice to the galaxy." With a vicious, passionate tone, he concluded, "The ruling classes of the New Republic can burn for all I care. The First Order has risen to make things right!

"… finding purpose for the dregs of the galaxy is a central motivation here. Deny it as you wish, but we have other options. I have dedicated my life to these people – to the First Order, not to Snoke, or Ren, or the High Command. None of them! To the Order. Itself."

* * *

At the Battle of Crait, reports are that the First Order fielded thirty star destroyers and the _Supremacy_ , whose combined complements totaled a little less than five million adults. This was not the entirety of the First Order fleet. Half, maybe. To use very round numbers, one can assume the Order has at least ten million people aboard ships. These would be supported by a hinterland of populated infrastructure, dispersed through their core worlds. Ratios are difficult to come up with for a technologically advanced but early stage civilization, but doubling the population to twenty million seems as good a number as any.

If we assume an average lifespan of seventy-five to one hundred years, then under normal conditions, the population will need an influx of two to three hundred thousand new members per year. The First Order has only been around thirty years, it is often in a semi-wartime-posture, and life is cheap. As a result, they probably need to add new members even faster. But let's run with that number for now.

In most populations, new members are born to them. But the First Order allows procreation among only a small percentage – all officers and those technicians above a certain rank. Their contribution would make up a statistically insignificant fraction. The bulk of the Order's new members must come from outside. For indoctrination reasons, they choose to recruit children, infants if possible.

This means each year their harvesting missions must bring in an average of a quarter million young children and infants. Most are picked up for free, especially in disaster areas, war zones, or districts which are perpetually poverty-stricken. In the absence of those situations, the Order can be persuaded to pay nominal fees for children and so there exist factors (also known as slave traders) who will gather children and sell them to the Order at regularly scheduled intervals and mutually arranged pickup points (also known as slave markets). Often, these are the children of slave populations in various pocket empires that flourish in the Outer Rim, whose existence is officially denied by the New Republic, but they exist nonetheless.

The rumors that the Order _steals_ children are filthy lies spread by the Republic scum to cast aspersions on the heroic work the Order does in providing good homes and careers for the unwanted of Republic society. Also, it would be dangerous, tedious, and inefficient to go door-to-door locating and abducting people. How the factors manage to acquire the children, and whether the parents (slaves themselves in most cases) had any meaningful consent to the sale, is not something the Order looks into too closely. By design, the children are too young to say. Even if they could, everyone has a sob story, as tragic as they are difficult to verify. Armitage Hux followed his father's policy of pretending everything was aboveboard even though he strongly suspected it wasn't.

Because of this hypocrisy, he preferred not to buy from factors. He wouldn't be disappointed to see their ilk vanish from the galaxy altogether, along with slavery itself. It was one of the reasons why he stubbornly insisted on calling the harvesting program 'slave harvesting' even though that wasn't its official name and the vast majority of their intakes went on to be troopers or workers.

He didn't want anyone forgetting what they were actually doing – perpetuating one of the very things the Order existed to destroy. He kept careful notes on the slave traders he dealt with so that when the day came that the First Order overthrew the Republic and restored civilization, he could turn his attention to dealing with them the way they deserved.

In the meantime, the Order needed children and the children deserved better than what the galaxy would otherwise give them. If he could get them under honorable terms, he would move heaven, hell, and the entire First Order fleet to do it.

* * *

It started with a news report. Hux hadn't followed the news since he'd met Snoke, but he did keep up with communiques and whatever correspondence people sent him within the Order. It was always work-related, so he always needed to do this. Occasionally this included reports of news from the larger galaxy, as these things could effect shipments of supplies for the base or a potential harvesting mission. This time, it was the latter.

It was sent by Phasma, which was singular by itself, since it was text. She was not the most literate individual he knew, which wasn't surprising given her background. Speaking of which, that was all the message said: 'Anotther Parnassos in proccess' [sic – she could at least spell her own home world correctly, so there was that]. Then a link to a Republic news article. The article wasn't ranked as breaking news, urgent, or any other priority headline, so he wondered how Phasma had found it. But there it was.

He read it. He agreed with her assessment. He immediately convened his staff on the _Finalizer_ by holo and on the planet's surface in person. He gave guidelines and orders, then left by shuttle to meet personally with Leader Snoke. This was going to be a big one.

* * *

He sincerely hoped whatever Snoke was eating was noodles. It didn't really look like noodles, but there were many strange foods in the galaxy. Hux decided to pretend they were noodles.

He said, "Sir, there is an urgent crisis situation on the Outer Rim planet of Lebeka. In the Republic Senate, the controlling faction has downplayed the fallout from their recent civil war, but we have reliable information that the planet's ecosystem is in collapse. They had a population of half a billion at the last census, which was more than a decade ago, before their political upheaval. It's believed to be less now."

"Is that relevant?"

Hux paused. "The crisis is, sir. Due to the scale, this would not be a normal slave harvesting mission. Since we have the Resurgent-class vessels available, we have the capacity to make a single mass evacuation-"

"My compassion is limited. Is this _relevant_ to my interests?" There was an edge to the repetition of Snoke's question that made Hux tense all over.

"Sir … from a resources standpoint alone, this would fill our quota for recruits for at least a year, possibly several, with a single mission. We won't have to expose ourselves as much in the Outer Rim. We can be more strategic in our presence and more easily keep the Republic in the dark about our numbers and strength."

Snoke stared at him for a long moment, sifting through Hux's thoughts. The alien pulled a small frown and went back to his meal. Purple-blue wormy-looking things disappeared into his mouth.

It was not approval. "I don't understand, sir." It was a perfect situation. He couldn't see why Snoke wasn't immediately onboard with it. He was at a lull with the megaweapon project as the construction droids worked non-stop in phase I excavation. They could (and were) staging and prefabricating sections in orbit for later installation, but largely they were waiting for the digging to be complete. The only thing he'd been doing lately was aggravating Peavey by continuing to use his brand-new, top-of-the-line battlecruiser as a cargo freighter. (Though he had to suppose that using it as a nursery ship for infants wasn't going to go over any better.)

Snoke left him standing there uncertainly for a quarter of his plate before finally addressing him. "Anyone you recruit today won't even be a subadult by the time your megaweapon is ready. They are useless to us. A distraction. Your free time should be devoted to the training program refinements you implemented after your father's inevitable death. The cohort which was your primary focus should be transferred to the _Finalizer_ where they will continue to receive your personal attention. When they are nearing graduation, I will want them transferred to my flagship so I can examine them personally."

"The whole class?"

"The best among them. The special group you have Captain Phasma overseeing. There may be some among them of use. But they are too many, too weak, and too unformed for me to detect it at this time. Continue your efforts in molding them. Some among them will have important roles to play in our eventual victory."

"What you are proposing is a longer-term distraction than this single harvesting mission. This will take no more than two weeks."

"We no longer need harvesting missions. Once your weapon is ready, the Republic will fall. We will have their armies to assimilate and command. We will no longer need to hide in these so-called 'Unknown Regions'." Snoke went back to eating.

Snoke seemed so certain. Hux's brows drew together as he tried to decide what he should do here. Snoke had not actually given him an order. Was this … a discussion? Was he supposed to explain his logic further? Or did Snoke merely want someone to agree with him? There was a place for both. Hux knew well the value of unquestioning obedience and in some circumstances, it was called for. Was this one of them?

Initially, Snoke had punished him for having the temerity to speak to anything but a direct question, but now … what was he supposed to do with this? Guess? He supposed he would. He had before survived Snoke's displeasure and he was sure he would again. If he didn't, well.

Hux said, "We already have the facilities and the personnel to handle the recruits. It is a sunk cost. Trained soldiers are versatile in ways droids and war machines are not. There are many things that can go wrong between now and the fall of the Republic. Even after the fall, it may be years before we finish consolidating our power. I don't want to rely on converted Republic personnel. _Our_ people will be loyal. Theirs? They are faithless by definition. It costs us little to mitigate a great deal of risk."

"How much does it cost me to listen to you whining about it?" Hux winced, but he didn't take any of it back. Also, he knew a concession when he heard one, even if it was surprisingly coming out of Snoke's mouth. "I know your true reasons here. You have gone soft on those teaching worlds. You have lost the fine edge your father sharpened into you." Snoke pushed aside his empty plate and used a napkin to pat dry the skin around his mouth. "You wish to do this thing?"

The insults didn't sting much. It wasn't something he didn't know about himself. "Yes sir. I do."

"If it delays any of my projects, then I will dismantle the harvesting program altogether. I will be sending two of my enforcers to observe."

Hux decided to pretend it was the authorization he was asking for. "Thank you, sir. I will make preparations."

Snoke waved at an aide who had been standing off to the side, either to bring another course or clear the table. Hux didn't stick around to find out. He made a short bow and saw himself out.

* * *

"We're not going to show up to get shot at," Hux said with a chuckle. He was standing in front of the video pickup, his image (two-dimensional, given the limitations of the encryption and the infrastructure on Lebeka) being transmitted to the sovereign of the planet. "You must be able to give us some assurances of safety, your majesty."

"The Republic controls commerce and industry. They are the ones who hold the true power. They own what passes as a government here. I can only speak for the people."

"Then control the people who are manning the defense stations. Unless you have an automated system, it will be people making the decision to fire on us."

"This is not so easy. They live within those stations and intercept everything that comes in from other worlds. They support themselves thusly and claim they do not receive enough to share. When we rose up to contest the inequality, the split of resources where they kept everything for themselves, they used their nuclear weapons and their warships, telling us it was a police action, necessary to keep the peace. They have advanced their technology and automated until they do not need us. We are surplus now. Three hundred million people they would rather see gone. It is genocide. They think of it as pest control." The monarch spoke with a calm and grave voice, as though he were dispassionately stating facts.

"Three hundred million against a few tens of thousands? Why don't you fight back?"

"We have no weapons. We were a simple people. In the time of the Old Republic and even the Empire, there was no need. But now the Republic only cares about taxes, not the welfare of its people. We are unnecessary."

"It is hard for me to believe this is as skewed as you say."

"Then you, too, will fail to help us. Neutrality always favors the oppressor." The king looked down, the weight of an impossible burden pressing down on him. He made no further attempt to persuade. He didn't beg or engage in histrionics. The time for weeping and wailing had long since passed.

Hux studied him. He didn't end the transmission. He didn't speak for a while. The king was still. He was either patient or utterly hopeless. Finally, Hux said, "My father told me, 'It is a characteristic of the powerless that they don't have anything to offer you.'" Although Brendol had meant it as justification for why you shouldn't bother to negotiate with the weak, his son had ended up taking a different lesson from it.

The king looked up and feigned politeness. "Was your father a wise man?"

"He said many things I have had reason to reflect on over the years. What I am thinking is that if you were able to do what I am asking, then you wouldn't be asking for my help."

"Your father was, truly, a wise man."

* * *

"We have a new assignment," Hux told the command staff in the morning meeting. "The royal structure on Lebeka has finally admitted the obvious, which is that the New Republic will not be sending relief or assistance for the planetary famine that has resulted from their failed revolt against the wealthy class. Their ecosystem has collapsed. Food production effectively ceased months ago. The population is starving and their government, propped up by the Republic, is fine with that. Prime conditions for a harvesting mission.

"The effected population is larger than any we've served previously. I am capping our intake at five hundred thousand." There were gasps and expressions of consternation around the table at the scale. "I've done this before on the _Absolution_ , but it was only the one ship. We'll be taking three: The _Finalizer_ , the _Absolution_ , and the _Harbinger_ will be diverting from current activities to serve as primary transport. We'll be bringing some Imperial-class destroyers as escort and other transports as drop ships. I should have the fleet defined within a few hours. We are already in route to the Downs for rendezvous."

Hux turned to Major Vannd. "I need you to review this with the resources director and make sure I'm not making promises we can't keep. We'll need to feed and house only. Clothing and anything more complicated than first aid or minimal washing will be dealt with on the Downs. They've been alerted. We will be picking up supplies and transferring personnel before we get underway." To the rest, he said, "This one mission is equivalent to a year's worth of harvesting. Maybe two. Overall, it frees up our ships for other assignments."

"Five hundred thousand … children, sir?" Captain Peavey asked.

"Yes." As he had expected, Peavey was peeved.

"Where?"

Hux smiled thinly. "Here. One hundred-sixty-five thousand per ship."

"That … exceeds our complement by … nearly a hundred thousand people. We can't support that many. Sir."

"There might be more. The count is never accurate. Get some food in them and they run all over the place." Hux was vastly amused by Peavey's expression. He tried not to smile too much. "In any case, the ship's complement is based on adult humans in long-term residence, not children or even infants kept for a few days."

"Infants?"

"Yes. Infants," he said firmly, waiting to see if Peavey would argue. He did not. He never did. He typically confined himself to silence, stiff posture, and refusing to look at his commanding officer. Every now and then, Hux would catch an expression of ridicule or disdain out of the corner of his eye, but Peavey fixed his face if Hux looked at him directly. It was far from Hux's most important personnel conflict, but he had to admit he took a certain joy in needling the old man.

Hux said, "We will have to support them for no more than week, depending on delays in loading and unloading. The bigger problem will be successfully tending them for the journey, since we are at a skeleton crew. _All_ adult crew will be involved. Even you. You're a family man. Aren't you, Captain?"

Peavey stared at him in horror. "Those were my own children, sir. Not … plague victims."

Hux regarded him for a long moment. "Well. Yes. Successful decontamination might take longer than the mission itself. It's a price we will have to pay." He took a moment to savor the captain's unhappy expression before turning to the rest. "We will be on double shifts – emergency protocols to be in effect."

Hux continued, "Briefings and what training we have time for will be provided to all personnel tomorrow at end of shift one and then again at beginning of shift two. Everyone on a duty roster needs to attend one of those two sessions. No exceptions. Two of Leader Snoke's personal enforcers will be arriving tomorrow to monitor performance, so," Hux paused, smiling slightly at everyone, "let's make sure we don't have complications. Any questions at this point?"

All were silent.

"One other point before we dismiss," Hux said. "The economic history of this planet has led to wealth, technology, and power accumulating in the hands of a privileged class. That class is, of course, loyal to the New Republic who enables them to continue hoarding. When the people rebelled, they bombed them, destroyed the environment, and retreated into sealed habitats. They have not been informed of our coming. It is not my intention to inform them until we're there, so they can't panic and summon aid from the Republic. If they interfere with our operations, we're going to destroy them."

"Is that … Wouldn't that be a declaration of war, sir?" Captain Peavey asked.

"First, we're already at war with the New Republic. We have been since they rebelled against the Empire. And second, no. We were merely assisting the legitimate king in routing the parasitic corporations who were attempting to murder an entire population. Any open investigation will reveal that the Republic was standing by idly while this atrocity played out under their noses.

"The government doesn't want that. I doubt they'll start anything, but if they do, we'll finish it. Should Leader Snoke authorize it, we can return later and add another planet sympathetic to our side, although it would take extensive disaster remediation. Even in that case, the evacuation should proceed as planned."

* * *

"All ships are in attack position?" It was the start of shift after an uneasy night of sleep. Hux had toyed with the idea of hitting stims and double-checking everything, but he needed to trust his team and he needed to be as fresh as possible.

"Yes sir," Peavey said. Their shifts overlapped now. Peavey would be in charge of the battlespace for the first shift, then it cycled to the captain of the _Harbinger_ , then the _Absolution,_ then back to the _Finalizer_. It left Hux free to oversee the extraction itself, knowing the best the Order had was covering his back.

Hux squared up before the holo pickup. "This is Colonel Hux of the First Order. We are here by invitation of King Raftsa, the recognized monarch of Lebeka. We take no stand in your internal political dispute. We will be providing humanitarian assistance to your people in the form of food and nutrient packs, and by evacuating the youngest and most vulnerable of your population. We will be gone within two standard cycles. All inquiries about our deployment and authorization can be directed to the king. Any attempt to interfere with our mission will be met in kind."

He waited. Minutes dragged on. A quarter hour. Hux checked in with the royal representative to make sure all ground arrangements were going smoothly and the pickup schedule hadn't changed. He turned to Peavey when he was done. "Nothing yet?"

"No sir. All quiet."

Hux nodded. "Good. That's about what I expected. I hand command over to you, Captain. Inform me of any developments. I'll be on the first transport down. Do make sure it doesn't get shot out of the sky, will you?"

* * *

Up. Down. Up. Down. One hangar bay after another. People hustling. Space at a premium. Everything smelling wrong. His eyes itched from the polluted air and the back of his throat burned. He had to wonder how long it would be until the very air on Lebeka was too contaminated for life. What if they had come too late? What if the children they were evacuating were the only survivors? Even then, he supposed, it was better than Parnassos.

He tried to shake those thoughts away. Tiny infants gave way to wobbly toddlers who were replaced, a few trips later, by young children. It was exhausting work. Meal breaks were short and taken standing. Stims were distributed at the end of second shift and again at the end of third.

Hux tried stay close to Snoke's observers, the two Knights of Ren, but they split up the first time they landed. He ended up with one he judged to be male, if the tone of the vocoder and the manner of his gait was any indication. The other one walked like a woman, which wasn't conclusive, but Hux went with the mental label for now. Equally, he assumed they were both human or near-human going off their proportions and joints. But it didn't really matter.

He was more concerned about what they would report back. Neither showed any interest in his people or the cargo they were dropping off. They ogled at Lebeka like rubes. They seemed uncomfortable in their roles. The male took the orders of anyone who told him what to do. In what little Hux had seen of her, the female ignored everyone like their words were inapplicable to her. They certainly didn't stick together, back each other up, or show any signs that one commanded the other. Interesting.

They were on the last pickup of the night when the Order's run of good luck on the mission finally began to peter out. It started with the protesting crowd, then escalated quickly after the male knight was suckered by some mother's tale of woe and let in a girl who was twice the maximum age Hux wanted. The knight tried to threaten him with Snoke. That was laughable, really, but all Hux could think about as he stared into the man's inscrutable black visor was watching this same person cuddle and coo at a baby earlier. Tender and sweet.

He was a sentimental fool. _One of Snoke's enforcers_ was a sentimental fool. Hux knew he could harden this man up just like Brendol had showed him – show them how things had to be, force them to do it themselves, then congratulate them after with plenty of social support for the activity. It was simple. Formulaic. All he had to do was shoot the child to make his point. Hux let the girl go.

As the knight went back down the ramp, Hux looked to the cargo containers that had been offloaded earlier. They were at the back of the landing area. Everywhere else they'd landed, the emphasis had been on loading the children, with the containers left locked until the transport lifted off. They never landed in the same place a second time.

But here, the situation was disintegrating. No one was in command. Looters were already breaking into the supplies. He yelled down at the knight to warn him, then turned to a petty officer and gave orders to begin an orderly exit. They managed to lift off with only three corpses aboard, none of them Order personnel, and no serious injuries.

They'd already passed half a million intakes the flight before, so all in all, Hux counted it as a win. He'd just wanted to drop off the last cargo containers. The kids were extra.

* * *

 _A few weeks later …_

"Sir, there's been an irregularity in the inventory."

"What would that be?" Hux looked up at the supply technician. Her superior officer stood behind her, obviously not wanting to be the direct bearer of bad news.

"It seems that in the shuffling of supplies for the last harvesting mission, we … some of what was sent …"

"Spit it out, Petty Officer."

She glanced back at her boss, who nodded encouragement. She turned to Hux and said, "You see, the weapons for the graduating class of stormtroopers have gone missing, as well as munitions, armor, environmental suits, and equipment for training exercises over the next year. The best I can track it down, it appears that when food and relief supplies for Lebeka were sent up, these other containers were sent as well. You … wouldn't happen to still have them, would you?"

"No, of course not. Everything we had was unloaded on Lebeka." He gave a disinterested shrug. "What a tragedy," he added dryly, "that those starving Lebekans were expecting nothing but food and ended up getting weapons and survival gear mixed in with it." Behind the petty officer, her commander's expression shifted slightly. He knew this was no accident.

"Can we get them back?" she asked.

"No. Last I heard, Lebeka had another civil war – a brief one, but it was an utter rout. Seems they're declaring for the First Order now, but there's still a lot of chaos. No way to track what happened to what we sent down. Most of it was food, after all. Right?"

"Yes, but ..." She said nothing else. She looked at her datapad.

"Who was responsible for this mishandling?" Hux asked.

"Cap- uh, Captain Phasma, sir."

"She's virtually illiterate," he said. "Probably misread it. I will have her transferred to the _Finalizer_ where I'll oversee her remedial education personally. There's a cohort of students I'll need her help with anyway."

"Yes sir. But … what do we do about the supplies?"

"It doesn't matter," the manager said behind her.

"Buy new ones," Hux directed.

The petty officer still didn't understand. "The expense, sir!"

Hux humored her with an explanation. "What expense? The weapons cost us less than it would if we'd had to buy slaves for two years. Also, I've seen the shipments of kyber coming out of my project. The Order has the money. Buy new. I consider this matter closed."

"Yes sir," the manager said, stepping in to usher away the petty officer. "It is."


	11. Technical Issues

**A/N: Technician class conducts themselves a little differently from the Army and Navy – fewer 'sirs', more relaxed, more focused on getting the job done than on looking right while doing it.**

 **The First Order is, by the way, a stratocracy, which is distinguished from a military dictatorship or junta in that the rule by military officers is built into their articles of government and legal system. Also built into their articles of government (in my version in these stories) is the intention of transferring control back to a properly elected, legitimate galactic government once they have one to do it to. The original idea was that this would be the reformed Empire, but since Hux refused to play emperor, it reverted back to the Old Republic. They do not recognize the New Republic as a legitimate government.**

 **You know how sometimes when you're watching a show, you just wish they had a scene where the characters talked to each other like normal people and weren't constantly in the middle of high drama? Well, that's this chapter.**

* * *

"Dinner is served," Hux said, preceding a couple droids stacked with food service trays. The core of the engineering team was crowded into a room they'd labeled 'Central'. Not much of a name, but it worked. This was the command center for the staging work going on for Starkiller (a better name, although Hux would have preferred they called the planet that and not him), located in one of the prefabricated bases they'd had delivered by Boxbea. Staging at this point meant building the framework that would enclose and brace the excavated areas as digging continued.

"Oh, good! Food," said Jarkame. He was the group's primary astrophysicist. He and the other five members turned to retrieve their trays. They worked late most evenings. (Of course, there wasn't much else they could do, but having a clear goal and a lack of interfering management seemed to be doing wonders for focus and productivity.) Hux had found they were no different than nerfs in that all he had to do was show up with food often enough and they loved him. As long as the project stayed on track, he loved them right back. At least as much as the nerfs did.

Cheskar asked Hux, "Did you drop by the Droiders earlier? How are they doing?"

"Yes, I did. They're doing well," Hux said, settling in off to the side with his cup of taurine tea and a few biscuits. He'd already eaten dinner with the group who managed the progress of the self-replicating construction droids. "Digging continues. They remain excited about the kyber traces they've been able to refine from the tailings. Whatever vein they hit last month has played out until they go deeper. But we're sticking to the plan. It's excavation first and foremost. Mining is secondary. We're trying to pull up the next farium shipment. The droids are finding less of it than expected and need to be supplemented.

"It will be a while before they find crystals of any size. That they're already finding industrially significant gleanings is impressive, even if it was concentrated in a vein. They're seeing evidence of voids in that area – caves, but deeper in. I'm interested to see how that turns out." He had a strange, restless itch about it that didn't make much sense. It was like something was calling to him there. It made him feel weird and he'd had enough of weird feelings in his life lately. "It might be rather scenic before we hollow it all out."

Hux waved at the screens set up along two walls. They showed an interconnecting lattice of metal struts which had been coming together over the last week. The actual struts were parked at an inclined orbit, being worked by droids and bots. "How is the staging coming along?"

"Oh! Show him the gap!" Fabica said. She and Saycor were the 'putting things together' engineers.

"We were just looking at this section," Cheskar said, moving back to the controls. He zoomed in on a place where two struts were slightly askew from one another. "The droids brought it to our attention."

"I thought it was just a perspective thing," Fabica said.

Saycor nodded. "Then we were looking at the other angles, but it's still there."

"Like here." Cheskar flipped through three other viewing angles from different camera pickups. "See, there it is. So Allcasa suggested a spacer, but that's going to redistribute the pressure and even though this is doonium," they leaned forward and zoomed in on a portion, then stood to point, "I really don't want to find out what happens when the weight of half a planet gets concentrated on one link."

Allcasa said, "The material properties will change once we start channeling phantom energy, anyway. We don't have a lot of precedent for how it will work."

Saycor said, "Even if a spacer wouldn't shear, we still need to know what's causing the misalignment."

"Right," Cheskar said. "So Fabica is going to double-check the schematics and we have a bot going out there right now to take some measurements."

Fabica said, "I'll check after I eat."

Jarkame nodded. "Yep, gotta eat. Thanks, boss," he looked over at Hux.

Hux nodded to him. "Anything to keep the legions at work." To Cheskar he said, "What sort of measurements? Is it even the right strut?"

"I'm pretty sure it is," Cheskar said. Other than claiming a tray, they had so far ignored their food. "We've already checked and the ID marks match up. That's why I sent out a bot. I'm thinking it could be warped. Or there could be something about the join down on the other end. Once the bot's there, we'll get a closer look."

"The fasteners could have been over-tightened," Saycor said. "But if that happened here, then it's happened everywhere-"

Fabica put in, "Or it _could_ have happened everywhere. We can't be sure. Maybe just this one spot."

"Maybe, maybe not. Doesn't matter." Saycor continued, "Even if it happened in only one spot, the only way we'll be _sure_ it didn't happen anywhere else is to disassemble, recalibrate, and reassemble."

Hux put a hand on his forehead and wiped it down his face. "How much time would that take? You're most of the way done. These bracing structures go in at the end of next week. If they don't, then the droids can't continue digging."

"Well, they _could_ , but not without risk of collapse," Fabica said.

Hux drew in a breath to address that, but Lanlisa, the physicist, jumped in to beat him to it. "It would be stupid to risk that. We can't just hope the planet's crust holds up. For a narrow channel it might work, but not the way they're doing it. That's why we're building these braces. The crust doesn't cohere."

"I wasn't saying we _should_ keep digging," Fabica said. "I was just … pointing it out."

"We should keep our options open, yes," Hux said mildly, glad the group was self-policing. It saved him from having to step in and squash bad ideas. To Cheskar, he asked, "You said you thought it might be warped. How does doonium get warped? You said that was as strong as we could get that was available for purchase like this."

Cheskar shrugged. "Made wrong to start with. In the star forge. If it's wrong there, it's wrong."

"Can it be fixed?"

"No. That's the thing about doonium. You make it, that's what you've got. That's why they make starships out of the stuff. Crash into a bloody planet and your ship's hull is fine." They laughed a little. "Planet's hosed. And you might be paste inside the ship. But the hull's good. I'm not absolutely sure a spacer _wouldn't_ hold up."

"I am familiar with crash data, yes." Hux sighed. "If this one strut is made wrong, what are the chances there are others made wrong from the same batch?"

"High. They wouldn't have messed up just one."

"So," Hux said, "To sum up - if the fasteners were overtightened it means a complete tear-down because the same droids that did these fasteners did the rest, and they're all suspect then. If it's the strut itself, then we have to examine all of them and it probably won't be just the one. If by chance it is just this individual piece, then we can't fix it anyway." This was not pleasing. All the repercussions of this were not pleasing. But none of it was anyone's fault as far as he could tell. Hux yelled about a lot of things. This was not one of them. "Do we have replacements?"

"Not until the next shipment arrives, two weeks from now. Remember, we cut all the corners to take only exactly what we needed, put together as a kit. That way we'd have it early rather than waiting for them to do a full run on every piece."

"But they're making the other kits," Hux said. "We're going to assemble … what was it, forty-eight of these? Maybe we can rob what we need from a future shipment and have them double-up at some point."

"Yeah, forty-eight is the number. This is the first one." Cheskar turned at a noise from Jarkame. He was pointing at the structure on the screen. Cheskar said, "There's that bot we sent out." It was moving into position at one end of the beam.

Hux said, "We need to be thinking about other options and not let our thinking get boxed in."

"That's why I mentioned the spacer," Allcasa said.

"Are there other solutions?" Hux asked. "Are there ways we can re-check our assumptions?"

Cheskar looked over their shoulder at Hux. "You walked in on the middle of us trying to figure it out, so, you know, that's what we're doing." Their tone was a little exasperated. They turned back as numbers and text began to scroll up.

"I see." Hux accepted the polite rebuke and let the person do their job.

Cheskar said, "The beam's true. At least according to the bot."

"So it's not warped?" Hux asked. He knew he ought to keep his mouth shut and let his people work, but if he'd happened to walk in on something that was going to shut them down for weeks, he wanted to know right away.

Cheskar shook their head. "Nope. Not warped. Right length. Right strut. Right place."

"Check the join angle," Fabica suggested.

"We should back out the fasteners," Saycor said.

"We shouldn't touch the fasteners until we know what we're dealing with," Fabica said back. "They might be fine."

Hux stayed quiet while they bickered. He nibbled tensely on his last biscuit. Cheskar reported, "Angle of contact at the bottom join is within tolerance. But …" They enlarged the video feed from the bot.

"That's not flush," Fabica said, stating the obvious.

Saycor said, "What's that thing in there?"

They all leaned forward. Cheskar pressed a few buttons. The bot extended an arm that had an illuminator on the end, giving them a better view.

"It's a rock," said Lanlisa.

"There's a rock wedged in there," Allcasa echoed.

Jarkame said, "How did a rock get in there? It's out in the middle of empty space! It's a sterile environment. Why is that there? I checked it. I scrubbed it. How much debris is out there?"

Allcasa said, "Jarkame, calm down. Maybe it's not a rock. It just looks like one."

"It's definitely a foreign object," Cheskar said, maneuvering the bot.

Hux said, "Could it have been on the strut to start with?" They looked at him. "Like something picked up as contamination during shipping or unloading? Those freighters aren't clean. I've seen them myself."

Cheskar sent the bot to the opposite side, giving them a different view. Saycor said, "The compression force of those fasteners would have collapsed most minerals. That's not just a space chunk."

"No," Fabica said, "you're right. I'll bet that's a chunk of packing separator. It's compressed, though. See the layers?"

"Uh-huh," Cheskar said, pulling over their dinner. "I see it. Matter settled. Time to eat."

Saycor said, "So we'll back out the fasteners, clean that up, and reconnect. Then on with the show."

Fabica nodded. "I don't need to check the schematics after all."

"No," Cheskar said, "but we do need to change our inspection process. Someone should have caught that before the droids started in."

Fabica agreed. "I'll do that."

"I'll put together the commands for the assembly droids to tear down that section, get that packing peanut out of there, and put it back together." Saycor pushed away his finished tray and moved to a workstation to get started.

Hux sipped the last of his tea. "Such excitement. All's well that ends well."


	12. Asleep on the Job 1

**A/N: There will be a later chapter, Asleep on the Job 2.**

* * *

"Our intermediary has been able to pull up delivery of farium from Mon Cala. This has accelerated droid replication and thus, allowed us to begin work early on Phase II excavation. We won't be able to capitalize on the time saving unless we can expedite delivery of additional doonium strut via Kuat. I have-"

Hux stopped. He had turned from where he had been pointing at the relevant milestones on the project chart to face Leader Snoke. He found the creature slumped in his chair, eyes half shut, mouth slack. He looked dead. No, wait, he was breathing.

Hux blinked a few times. He knew better than to ask what was wrong or show alarm. He'd been summoned here to perform a duty. He had no instructions for dealing with his leader's incapacity, whether it was due to narcolepsy or Force magic.

The eight red-clad guards in the room did nothing. They were watching him just as always. As far as Hux knew, the black-clad ones – who had been introduced as the Knights of Ren – had finished whatever stint of guard duty they had and were now being sent out on missions. It was just an assumption – he knew little of Snoke's staff allocations. Maybe they'd just traded out colors on their uniforms. Snoke had made a few minor sartorial shifts for the Order in the last few months.

Hux considered his options as far as his presentation went. He swallowed and continued, "To effect this, I have used the authority you granted to me to requisition cargo space on the _Avenger_. It is being rerouted from the Pressylla system and I expect delivery of the strut in fifteen standard days." He continued on, facing Snoke and watching him as Hux spoke. Half his mind was on what he had to say, while the other half was bemused by the situation.

He was nearly done with his presentation when he was rudely interrupted by having his throat constricted with the Force. Snoke straightened with half a snarl, looking around himself warily. Two of the guards shifted their weight, but didn't quite go to an attack posture. Hux was released. Snoke blinked and seemed to think. "You were telling me about the start of work on Phase II. Go back to that part and resume your explanation."

Hux stood stiffly, resisting the urge to rub his throat. The assault felt almost routine by now – certainly his heart rate spiked, sweat prickled, and adrenaline washed through him – but the nausea and shakes didn't happen anymore. Being treated like a droid which could be rewound to a previous point in the recording? Well, he would have preferred to be treated with a little more dignity, but his preferences were immaterial. He cleared his throat, re-ordered his thoughts, and began again as instructed.


	13. Meeting Prep

**A/N: Hux and Cheskar are in a conference room on Starkiller, discussing a meeting Snoke had told Hux he needed to attend. Hux thinks his attendance is unnecessary, so he's griping about it to his underling. He'll be leaving in the morning.**

* * *

"I don't know why he wants me there for this meeting. I looked at the attendance list and it doesn't make much sense," Hux lamented to Cheskar. "There's no one on the High Command there. Why would he have a military operations meeting and leave out the top level leadership of the organization? _They_ should be there, not me."

"Are they still alive?"

"Yes, they're still alive! At least I hope so. It's not like I would know, though. Running an obituary column would be bad for morale." He thought about it. "I know Admiral Nayta is alive. She found this planet. She was alive then."

Cheskar nodded, pouring themselves some tea. "Maybe she's out doing more planetary surveys."

"And that's another thing," Hux said after watching Cheskar scoop an obscene amount of sugar into their drink, "why would he send his foremost admiral out on geological surveys? Of all things! It makes no sense!" He was louder than he needed to be, just for emphasis.

"No, that makes sense. At least to me. It's a good idea."

"How?"

"This planet?" Cheskar asked, pointing downward at the world they were on. "Is there anything more important to the Order right now than this planet?"

"But anyone could have found it!"

"No. You send your best people when things are this critical. That's how you do things."

"You don't send a star destroyer when a TIE fighter will do. You conserve your resources."

Cheskar pressed their lips together. "The military does, yeah. So that's how you're trained and it makes sense because you never know if you might be attacked. It's life or death. But my training is that if you have a resource, you use it. And you use it over and over because that's efficient and efficiency is the difference between a sort-of success and a big success."

Hux frowned at them but said nothing. Cheskar continued, "You see, this planet? Finding this planet? You have to make sure you send someone who's going to get the job done right the first time. Who won't get distracted. Who won't decide, 'Oh, here's a nice forest world without any intelligent life, I think we'll all take shore leave here, or maybe ground exercises.'"

"Ground exercises maybe. But shore leave? In the middle of a mission?"

"I don't know what you military guys do!"

Hux laughed. "Sometimes I forget how deficient the technician training is."

"Deficient? Ha!" Cheskar leaned forward. "Tell me how Coruscant was built."

"I … it's … It's millennia old. That doesn't matter."

Cheskar grinned, assured of victory. "And you don't know, do you?"

"I don't … need to know. It-" He shook his head.

"What do you learn in military history anyway? Just what the military did, right? Leaders, battles, dynasties, politicians maybe?"

"Yes." Hux took a drink of his unsugared tea. Cheskar had introduced him to the drink. It was good if you didn't saturate it with sweetener. Hux wasn't sure what the other officers were taught about military history. He'd barely passed the prerequisites based on his father's skewed lectures and skipped the formal military history curriculum altogether. But that wasn't something he admitted to anyone. Let Cheskar think he'd learned what he was supposed to have learned.

Cheskar held up thumb and forefinger a small width apart. "That's this much of history. The history of conquerors is not the history of the entire galaxy. You are missing so much! We're not the deficient ones. You are!"

"Pssh. I know the important things." Which was word-for-word Brendol Hux. Armitage knew how wrong it was, but he didn't know how else to respond to the accusation.

"Important? No, you don't. You can't have conquest without weapons. You can't have weapons without technology. You won't have technology without industry. You won't have industry without commerce." Cheskar ticked them off. "You won't have commerce without indulgence. You won't have _that_ without the meeting of basic needs like food, shelter, and safety. It's a flow chart. You know the end point and that's all you know. You don't know everything else that's required to get there."

Hux grimaced at being essentially being called ignorant and short-sighted, but neither of them listed 'tact' as a strength. They were a couple of nerds arguing about how the world worked. Hux explained, "If you're at that point, then you directly control people's safety. It closes the loop and you have a cycle, not a flow chart. You don't need to know any of the rest if you can control that one step." It was more of his father's bantha poodoo, but he wanted to hear how Cheskar tore it apart. His voice was uncertain, like he was asking a question rather than asserting the truth.

"You know that's wrong."

"I do not." Hux's tone shifted to a warning, because calling him a liar was a step too far. Especially when Hux was pretty sure he _was_ wrong. He just didn't know how to articulate it.

"I can prove it."

"Do so."

"You became an engineer."

"What difference does that make?"

"You told me you did it so you'd understand how things worked. You know it's important. You can't just rely on someone else to know things for you!"

Hux sighed. He'd been hoping for more of a deconstruction of Brendol's way of thinking, but he wasn't going to get that without telling Cheskar what he wanted and that wasn't going to happen. They were at an impasse for now, but it gave him things to think about. "There is only so much I can know. This is tiresome. What were we even talking about?"

Cheskar shrugged. "Admiral Nayta, the High Command, and the importance of assigning your best people to your most critical projects, instead of putting your success in the hands of someone who might not be up to it. Nayta got it done. That's what matters. I think Snoke putting her to it wasn't the underutilization of a resource, but instead a huge compliment to her, that he entrusted her with this important a mission."

Hux gave Cheskar a flat frown that by now, Cheskar understood to be capitulation. Cheskar leaned back and nodded to themselves. Hux pulled over his datapad and looked at the list of names. "So the reason why the High Command is not at the military operations meeting is because Snoke thinks this sort of thing is beneath them?"

Cheskar came forward again. "You told me Snoke didn't care if the harvesting missions continued. He's gearing up for something big in five years and he has no interest whatsoever in getting bogged down, distracted, or waylaid between now and then. When this big gun is up and running and he's got his flagship done, he'll still have a fleet of Resurgents, some dreadnoughts, all the old imperial star destroyers, the _Eclipse_ , all that stuff. It will still be here. Unless some idiot gets it blown up in the meantime."

Cheskar reached out to point at the datapad. "That's your proof of his priorities. _You_ are in this meeting. _Drewmill_ is in this meeting. Why? Neither of you have anything to do with military operations, but both of you are heading up projects you were told were Snoke's highest priorities. He wants to make sure you know what's going on. But what he doesn't need is the High Command pushing an agenda."

"Hm. You might be right. Some unidentified Knight of Ren is in the meeting, too."

"I don't know anything about those guys. Maybe they can't be effective observers without knowing the big picture? But I do know I'm right on the basics here. They don't teach you guys squat about bureaucracy or good administration. You know," Cheskar smiled and leaned on their crossed arms, "in our classes, they told us that was on purpose."

"Did they?" Hux gave him a guarded smile, remembering telling Dean Muhale that this was her chance to strike at Brendol. Would he have had Brendol killed if he hadn't already succeeded in rebelling against him and gotten away with it? Probably not. He certainly wouldn't be sitting here listening to a subordinate challenge his assumptions.

"They did," Cheskar confirmed.


	14. Death on the Job

**A/N:**

 **Warning: Suicide. Also, Hux voices a harsh point of view regarding suicide victims. This is not an authorial point of view, although it goes basically uncontested in the narrative so I want to clarify: not my personal point of view. The character has been established even in the time of Happily Ever After as being unsympathetic on this subject and having empathy issues in general.**

 **The knight is Kylo Ren, although as you may gather from the story, Hux has not been introduced or provided names. He only knows this one is taller than the first one he saw and the shorter of the two who went to Lebeka, and not a female like he suspected the taller one was who went to Lebeka.**

 **In Star Wars canon materials, the Napkin Bombing, Amaxine warrior attack, subsequent destruction of Rinnrivin Di's cartel, and the formation of the Resistance happened a little more than a year before the setting for this chapter. These are events from Claudia Smith's novel,** **Bloodlines** **. Which puts it only a little before the Burning of the Temple as it is placed in my series' timeline and near simultaneous with Snoke's appearance in the First Order. The setting for this chapter is about a year later.**

* * *

From Grey and Complicated, chapter "Light Seduction":

"Snoke vented his frustrations by abusing his subordinates when they displeased him, which was frequently."

* * *

From Happily Ever After, chapter "Gem Crystals":

Hux frowned. "I would tell you the story of Admiral Halcor. He was witness to Snoke venting his frustrations – he killed one person, injured another – for a mission failed due to poor intelligence and a bad response to changing conditions. But not actual incompetence. As Halcor told me when we left – any of us could have made that mistake. I told him, 'You are right. All we can do is be thankful we did not.'"

Hux exhaled heavily. "I suppose I should have been more empathetic. I found him dead by his own blaster the next morning. I had Lt. Sharhel with me, because one doesn't go barging into another's quarters without a witness. She suggested I conceal it." Hux laughed bitterly. "No. We concealed it from the general run, of course, but someone had to explain to Snoke that one of his admirals had made the 'choice' not to continue with his duty, due possibly to my callous last words to him.

"What Halcor did was treason. It was also a personal betrayal. Halcor knew someone would have to make a report and he'd already seen what happened to those who delivered news Snoke was not inclined to hear. He knew it would be _me_. The honorable, the _required_ , thing to do is to continue to serve as best one is able, until relieved by one's superior. The Rebellion, the Resistance? It's a short-sighted, fundamentally selfish act.

* * *

Hux was the lowest-ranked person in the room. Probably. In a combat situation or a matter of command, the military always outranked technicians. So in that context, he was higher than Drewmill. But they were in a meeting, where it was more important that she was at the top of her bracket as an operations manager. She really ought to be a director, but in either case she was above a relatively new colonel. Figuring out his standing was the first thing Hux tended to do when he walked in a room of people.

Then there was the Knight of Ren. Hux would have assumed him to be no higher than a captain, but here the knight was, attending along with him. Since there were not assigned places, Hux put himself next to the black-clad enforcer, in the larger-than-necessary gap between the knight and Admiral Halcor. Hux knew the admiral from his father's days when he had been an antagonist (and lower ranked), but never enough of one to warrant the attention of Armitage and his gang. Halcor gave him a sharp look like he would have been happier with the knight next to him. Hux ignored it.

Snoke was the highest-ranking present. That much was obvious. Just in case anyone was unclear on this, he was comfortably seated on something new that looked suspiciously like a throne. The rest of them were on their feet, having arrayed themselves around a projection of the galactic map as the foremost general present gave an overview of their current military operations and posture.

None of the High Command were here, as the attendee list had shown. Hux decided to take this as a statement of faith in the High Command and a commentary on Snoke's priorities for the Order, as Cheskar had insisted. It was a healthier point of view than the alternative, which he drove from his mind by staying focused on the various reports.

They started with an overview of current action (none at the moment), a recap of recent action (Snoke looked bored; he'd obviously heard this before which was fitting and meant he was on top of developments), and then current resources and resource allocation. After that, it was turned over to sector commanders for detail. Hux noted the absence of discussion on objectives. He assumed this was because these things were no longer up for debate under Snoke's leadership. How he felt about that was another thing to guide his thoughts away from.

After a few sectors had been covered, attention turned to General Allinine, who said, "Establishment of the refinery complex in the Pressylla system continues as planned, despite the unexpected diversion of the _Avenger_ to function as a _cargo_ vessel. This constitutes the third time _Colonel_ Hux has used your name in an abuse of his authority to divert resources to his project, unnecessary diversions caused by a failure of oversight on his part."

Those were _very_ direct words, every one of them intended as a barb. Hux understood now. This must be why he'd been included in the meeting – to receive a dressing down for exceeding the limits of his rank. He stood taller and raised his chin. It was not news to him that a number of people in the Order objected strongly to his use of the new ships for transporting materials or harvesting refugees, or that it was considered grossly impudent for someone of his age and relatively low rank to be requisitioning capital ships like they were shuttles available for his beck and call.

It was surprising she'd bring it up in open meeting like this. It indicated a level of disrespect he might need to do something about. He made a mental note to hunt down Tritt Opan, one of his father's assassins. They went way back. Tritt had always had a sort of macabre fondness for Armitage. Not that he was considering assassinating a general for making remarks about him, but it was always good to have options and allies. He might need them.

Snoke looked over at Hux inquiringly. "Colonel Hux? What do you have to say for yourself?"

"I followed your orders, sir, as I understood them." He'd done what he had to do in two of those cases, and the third with Lebeka? Well. He'd do it again if he ever had the opportunity.

"You understood them correctly." Snoke turned back to the general. "He has the authority to make these diversions. If his rank unsettles you, I can advance it above yours."

Even Hux's brows jumped at that. Admiral Halcor shot Hux an outraged look as though Hux was responsible for the idea. Allinine coughed. "No, no sir. That's not what I was suggesting."

"His purpose here is to understand how these might impact our larger operations so his future allocations will be done with more care. I remain pleased with progress on the megaweapon."

Hux had to frown severely to keep from smirking, because it looked like he was going to get away with it on top of Snoke publicly upbraiding a general on his behalf. That was a more ringing endorsement than any he would have expected to hear from Snoke's twisted little mouth.

It was true that both of the times he'd used the destroyers for cargo had been absolutely necessary for keeping to the schedule and then inching ahead of it. They were the fastest ships in the galaxy large enough to carry what he needed and plow through pirate-infested space without pause. But using them as freighters was inherently offensive to the older, hidebound holdovers of the Empire. It wasn't the sort of maneuver that would even occur to their generation.

Allinine was not quite done, showing a foolhardy but admirable persistence on the matter. "But sir, this is beneath the dignity of the vessels. It is not the purpose of warships, I-"

"The purpose of your ship is whatever I say it is," Snoke snapped at her. "Should I choose to make the entire thing a luxury yacht for the Hutts and your crew as the servants thereupon, you would do well to master the new skill set required, no matter how 'beneath your dignity' you think it would be."

Allinine blinked at him in surprise, as did most present. Was Snoke actually suggesting that selling a ship and crew into sex slavery was not entirely out of the question? It was rhetorical, sure, but Hux had not to date noticed that Snoke had a sense of humor. It felt more like a warning of the lengths to which Snoke was willing to degrade the Order and the members of it to succeed.

At the silence, Snoke asked, "Did you have any incursions during the _Avenger's_ absence?"

"No sir." They could have, though. Every ship Hux pulled from somewhere was doing something at that location. Snoke was right to make sure he had a better grasp of what he was disrupting when he made such requisitions.

"Then it is immaterial," Snoke said dismissively. "Continue."

* * *

"… of the three remaining Amaxine holdouts we identified, two were eliminated. The last fled into Rylothian space."

Snoke lifted his head from where he'd been resting it on his fist, elbow on the arm of his throne. He directed his attention to Vice Admiral Pabril who had been speaking. "And?"

"And they … escaped, sir." Snoke was staring at him. It was enough to unsettle anyone. "Aboard a ship called the _Trifling Pride_ , sir."

"The name is irrelevant. You include it to conceal the lie. You were seen." Each of Snoke's short, choppy sentences had a snap to them like a whip. Hux's posture changed into a slight crouch. The knight's helmeted head turned toward him and Halcor looked at that, then at Hux, but Hux didn't take his eyes off Snoke. He didn't understand why everyone else in the room wasn't hearing what he had just heard. It was plain as day.

"Rylothian space is contested, sir," Pabril said. "Our intelligence was that the New Republic wasn't there."

"Then the intelligence was wrong!" Snoke straightened in his seat. "Did I not inform this assembly at our _first_ meeting of the importance of not being seen by the New Republic fleet?"

"I-" Pabril reached for his throat, then looked in alarm to his right and left. General Allinine was on one side. Colonel Arnoeze was on the other. Neither of them did anything aside from looking from Pabril to Snoke.

Snoke stood, seeming taller than Hux knew him to be. It was an illusion, he assumed. Some manner of Force-trick to look more impressive than he was. He gestured expansively as he spoke. "I know the future. The First Order will reign across the galaxy. The New Republic will be reduced to ashes, forgotten in the annals of history as nothing but a brief, pointless rebellion."

Pabril fell to his knees, clutching desperately at his neck as though he might find some hidden combination of pressure that would allow him to breathe.

Snoke continued, "But between now and then, every sighting the New Republic makes of us builds the resistance we will eventually face. The cost of our victory will be calculated from these missteps. Success is assured! Survival – is not!"

Pabril gave up on his throat and pulled his blaster with a wavering hand. The two guards closest to Snoke moved forward, but Allinine was quicker. She disarmed him immediately. Colonel Arnoeze didn't twitch. Snoke made an offhand motion and Pabril slid across the floor to the feet of one of the guards. He gasped noisily, suddenly able to breathe.

Everyone at the meeting relaxed except Hux. He knew it wasn't over. Pabril had drawn a weapon. There had to be a payment for that. Hux knew this personally. He was unsurprised when Snoke said, "End him."

The guard's vibro-voulge flashed on and down, taking just enough time for all of them to turn to see as it cut off the man's head and bit into the floor beneath him.

"No!" General Allinine said, raising both hands in a startled, frustrated gesture. One of them still held Pabril's blaster, but she wisely had it by the top of the gun, not the grip. She put her hands down and turned to face Snoke for her unseemly outburst. The Empire and the First Order shared this in common: extreme stoicism was the norm. Any deviation from it was a failing.

Next to Hux, the knight heaved several deep breaths – either aroused or sick, Hux didn't know, given the man's helmet. On the other side of him, Halcor was fidgeting. "He didn't- He let him- What-?"

"Shut up," Hux hissed to him.

Snoke stared at Allinine, who dropped her eyes to the floor. She was struck with some telekinetic blow of the Force anyway. She staggered backward but didn't fall. She also didn't fight or move aside from keeping her footing. Snoke told her, "You disarmed him in an attempt to save _his_ life. Not mine." He looked around the group. "I know your thoughts. I know when you conspire against me. I know when you pathetically attempt to deceive me. I will eliminate this cancer of disorder from your ranks one individual at a time until only the pure and obedient remain! Am I understood?"

"Yes sir." It came out as a near-simultaneous chant after a beat of hesitation for them to determine this was a question meant to be answered.

"Good." Snoke sat back down. The guard turned off the vibro-voulge, the hilt of it thunking to the deck like emphasis to Snoke's word. "The remaining reports will be submitted to me in writing. You are dismissed."

* * *

"You knew that was going to happen," Admiral Halcor said accusingly after they were alone in the lift.

"Of course I did. The man drew a weapon on his commanding officer." Hux wasn't happy about being trapped in here with someone his father had labeled as an enemy of their interests. It was startling that such a person had become an admiral, but perhaps that was something recent. Snoke had certainly been thinning the ranks at the top of the organization, and he'd been at it for a full year now. Many things were changing.

"He was being strangled by the Force!"

Hux shrugged. "That doesn't change anything. You do not draw a weapon on your commanding officer. Certainly not intentionally."

Halcor fumed at the truth of that. "All he did was pursue a ship into Rylothian space. It's a contested area. How could he know the New Republic would have ships there? He had to have broken off pursuit as soon as he saw them! That's the only way the Amaxines could have gotten away!"

Hux looked at the older man askance. "What do you want me to say?"

"Any of us could have made that mistake!"

Hux gave him a puzzled look, even more confused as to what the man was asking of him. "You're right. All we can do is be thankful we did not."

"You're not going to do anything about it." He sounded disbelieving. The doors opened.

Hux was disappointed to find they were both getting off on the same floor. "There's nothing to be done, Admiral. You heard him. He knows about any conspiracies against him. How do you think he-" Hux shook his head. "No. I can't talk about this. I can't even think about it. Do your work. Follow your orders."

"But that doesn't protect us."

"It never did." Hux stopped to give him an incredulous look. What sort of privileged lifestyle had the man had where he was insulated against the whims of those in power? Had he literally never had someone like Brendol or Snoke over him, prone to contradictory, impossible orders and unrestrained sadism? Brendol had hammered it into him that this was how everyone was when they had power. Snoke followed the pattern to a T. Hux didn't understand why everyone else was so dense about it. He snorted.

"You and your father made this organization what it is today." Halcor leaned in, teeth bared. "Everyone knows it, if they're old enough to have seen what it was like before. Snoke is the result of Brendol's twenty-year campaign to get rid of anyone who was willing to take a stand, and replace them with a generation of children who follow orders they don't even understand! Now that there's an invader among us, you're on your knees in front of him."

He could deny it, but the truth was a sharper blade. "As are you. Where were you when this 'time to take a stand' came?"

The admiral stiffened. "We'll see how much of a favorite you are when you're the one delivering bad news."

"I'm not going to fail."

Halcor sneered at him like he knew something Hux didn't. "No. Of course you won't." He walked to the next door down and checked the room number over the entry pad, then opened it. Apparently, he was doing the same as Hux – staying the night on the _Eclipse_ rather than immediately returning to his own ship. In Hux's case, he'd scheduled several other pieces of business for the following day, as it was an efficient use of his time. It was annoying to see Halcor had done the same.

Hux shook his head and walked off, pacing half the hall before he realized his assigned room was directly next to the admiral's. It was another spot of annoyance. He consoled himself that Halcor didn't know where Hux was bunking. He toyed with the idea of changing rooms anyway, but dismissed it as paranoia rather than prudence.

* * *

Hux woke with a start and a ringing noise of a blaster discharge in his ears, like it had been right here in the room with him. He had his knife in his hand when he signaled the lights, but the place was empty except for himself. He went to the comm system. He asked to be patched through to Halcor's room without even thinking about why. There was no answer.

After a quick search of his room, he sank into the chair next to the desk, laying his knife on the surface. He ran his fingers lightly over the handle as he thought about what he'd heard. Was it a nightmare? He'd been having a dream before he woke – one where he was Halcor, pacing, fuming, dwelling. He was a boring man, really. Or at least Hux's imagined version of him was. Halcor was a coward – he knew what had to be done, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. And then the blaster …

Hux grimaced and put his knife back into the sheath, taking care not to cut himself. He'd stabbed himself in the forearm several times in his life. One would think once would have been enough. It was a tricky little thing, so sharp it didn't even hurt at first. There was no way he was going to get back to sleep – not until this mystery was solved.

He dressed and sought out the floor officer, who was Lt. Sharhel. "I need to speak with Admiral Halcor on an urgent matter about yesterday's review meeting."

The lieutenant looked through her records. "Admiral Halcor is … booked in a guest room on this floor. Shall I comm him?"

"Yes, fine." Hux knew it wouldn't go through and was unsurprised when it didn't.

"He's not answering, sir. Perhaps he's deactivated the comm system or left early?"

"Can you see which room his transponder is in?" He knew perfectly well what room Halcor had walked into, but he needed to lead Sharhel down a path that ended with her opening the door to it. He was becoming more certain of what they'd find.

"I can't do that, sir. He's an admiral." She looked at him pointedly. She could do it, perfectly well, but she couldn't disclose the location to him. Halcor outranked him and wasn't even in Hux's chain of command.

Hux tried a slightly different tack. "Can you tell me if he's left the ship?"

She looked at him steadily and pressed her lips together. She wasn't supposed to tell him where Halcor was exactly, but 'is he on board this ship' was a valid question. She consulted her terminal, checking the transponder location as Hux knew she had to in order to answer. "He's still aboard, sir."

Hux nodded. "Good. I have reason to believe he is in urgent need of medical assistance. Please dispatch aid to him immediately."

"Sir … that … I'm not going to call a medical team so you can follow them to where he is. That is an abuse of the regulations."

"Let me answer for that. You are required to send assistance to him."

"Only if I believe the claim is credible."

"He didn't answer his comm and you know he's in his quarters." He gestured at the terminal she'd looked at earlier.

She didn't deny it. "Perhaps he doesn't wish to be disturbed. Why do you think he might need medical assistance?"

"Yesterday, we were both in a meeting with Leader Snoke." Calmly and with emphasis, he repeated again, "I believe Admiral Halcor is in urgent need of medical attention." Those two facts shouldn't have any connection at all, but as he could see from her face, they did.

She was silent. She looked away, seeming to think about the matter more deeply and at a greater length than would have been necessary pre-Snoke. "I will do a welfare check," she said.

"Thank you." That was exactly the outcome Hux had been hoping for, but if he'd asked for it, she wouldn't have taken him seriously.

"You're coming with me."

"Well … alright." Despite the differential in rank, as a security officer, she had the authority to order him to accompany her. It was rare for someone to use it unless they expected trouble. Hux followed along without argument. It would address his morbid curiosity at any rate.

Lt. Sharhel buzzed the door five times before shooting an uneasy look at Hux and using her override. Inside, Halcor was dead on the floor, having shot his own brains out with his service blaster. His datapad sat nearby, text blinking on it. The two of them stood fixed in the doorway until some junior officer turned the corner at the end of the hall. Hux took the lieutenant by the shoulder and pulled her into the room, letting the door whisk shut behind them.

"Don't tell me you've never seen anyone dead before," Hux said. She wasn't a technician. She ought to know better.

Her hand was over her mouth. "No, I have. Just not … like this." It was messy. Halcor had obviously overcharged his blaster to make absolutely sure it was a lethal shot. It showed some basic competence. Hux assumed that was why he'd heard it through the wall and a sound sleep. She asked, "He killed himself, didn't he?"

"Yes. Obviously." Despite the overwhelming evidence, Hux still looked around the room and the attached refresher carefully in case there were signs of foul play. Years of staging assassinations gave him a pretty good idea of what to look for, yet found nothing suspicious.

Sharhel had picked up the datapad and was reading it. "General Brendol Hux," she said slowly. "That's your father, isn't it?"

"What? Yes, it is." He approached her, stopping on the other side of the body. "Let me see that."

"He blames you."

Hux reached out and took the datapad away from her since she wasn't offering it. She made an objecting noise, but he ignored it. He skimmed over the text. His father was mentioned, names were named – even some of the other children in Armitage's gang. Hux grimaced at the screen. "Lies." They were not.

He scrolled down rapidly to the end, reading the last paragraph or two. Thankfully, they had nothing to do with the Hux name. Hux snorted. "He says he celebrated when the Death Stars were destroyed. Quietly, in his room! Pah! He's a traitor. Good riddance to him. How did a man like this become an admiral?" he scoffed.

"I need that back," Sharhel insisted. But it wasn't an order, which technically she could do in the course of her duties. She was, after all, the floor officer and this wasn't Hux's ship where he could automatically override her. Floor officers were usually petty officers or even stormtroopers, but Snoke's guests apparently rated someone higher up and better trained. Probably because of things like this.

"Why?"

"It's evidence."

"Of what? His treason?"

"Treason? He's an admiral!"

"That doesn't matter. He's not allowed to kill himself. There's no way out of this! This is pointless defiance!"

"Defiance? He's dead! I need that back." She extended her hand for the datapad, which he ignored.

"This is not public knowledge." This was what Halcor had meant with that last, cryptic threat, he realized. If Hux hadn't been here, the information would have been recorded as evidence, transmitted around, an investigation opened, and an arrest order issued before Hux even knew he was in danger. What would Snoke do then? He might defy the Order's judicial system for his own power, but Hux doubted he'd do it for Hux's benefit. He didn't even know how much Halcor had on him, but what he'd seen was enough to suspect the man's rank had come from keeping the right secrets.

"How did you know he died?" she challenged him, putting both hands on her hips. It was an inch or two above her blaster.

Hux pointed. "Because that is the wall that adjoins my room! I heard the shot. What, do you think I snuck in here, murdered him, then left a deranged screed implicating myself before I snuck back out and made sure you found the scene?"

"Oh," she said quietly. Him, as a suspect of the admiral's death, made no sense at all. It was the dozen or so others further in the past Hux was concerned about at the moment.

Hux lifted the datapad. "He's angry because we argued last night, about my father whom we both knew and obviously, he harbored some paranoid delusions about. I'm taking this to Leader Snoke." He wheeled and made his escape before she could collect herself.

* * *

He stewed in the lift, reading the rest of the suicide note. It was infuriating. Halcor had joined the military back when it was the Old Republic. He'd served in the Empire, then been unlucky enough to be on one of the ships that retreated to the Unknown Regions and eventually formed the First Order. Unlucky for him, because he didn't support the organization he was part of.

It was infuriating to read because despite feeling this way – scheming against the Empire and then the Order, celebrating the victories of their enemies, quietly thwarting their own success – Halcor had never taken a public stand. But he'd been there in the background sabotaging things the whole time. Somehow he'd even managed to get promoted. As far as Hux could tell, the suicide wasn't about the direction the Order was going in or any kind of honorable, principled objection. It was about a certainty he would be exposed if he continued work under a telepath.

He was a liar. He was a traitor. He was a coward.

There was something about the man's life, laid out here in yellow and black on the datapad, that enraged Hux. His heart hammered and his breath came fast. He felt a sweat break out over himself. He wanted to go back to the man's quarters and kick the corpse until he wrenched his hip. It was wrong. Halcor was wrong. His life was wrong. It wasn't how things were done. But he was dead and it was frustrating and there was nothing Hux could do to harm the man further. He smashed the electronic device to flinders instead, scooping up most of the shattered remains and dumping them down three separate disposal chutes.

He still felt cheated. Halcor would never have to answer for his dereliction of duty, his misplaced loyalties, or his repugnant pretense of being a good officer while harboring sentiments like this. It made Hux feel like his own life was a sham, like his slavish devotion to duty, the lengths of his obedience, or his devotion to the cause, were somehow a pointless waste of time if someone could simply get away with rebellion over so many years, right in their midst. Here Halcor was insisting there was a moral uprightness to subterfuge and sabotage and Hux wasn't getting to so much as argue with him!

Snoke was laughing when Hux came to Veska's desk to ask about his availability. It was still shift three. He should have been asleep. But maybe he didn't sleep. Hux didn't much either, these days. Being awakened by blaster shots and suicides didn't help.

"Leader Snoke," Hux said. "I did not expect to find you here." He tried to compose his thoughts from the seething mess they'd become.

"Ah, my faithful dog, a fanatic to the core, anxious to savage those who lurk in the shadows. Admiral Halcor is no longer with us." He was cheerful.

"You knew?" He wondered if Snoke had caused it somehow. But no – Snoke might have been able to turn the blaster and activate the mechanism, but he wouldn't have been able to write the note. Hux politely ignored the rest of Snoke's condescending ramble.

"Of course I knew. As you did. Your words pushed him to it. And the realization that a generation of people you have trained are rising that he would be powerless to poison against me. You were right. We are better off rid of him."

"Of course, sir." And so he knew Snoke had seen and heard his exchange with Lt. Sharhel, despite it being across the ship and not in Hux's thoughts until Snoke had mentioned it. There was no escape except the one Halcor had taken. Hux would not lower himself to that. He would not abandon the Order and the people in it – _his_ people.

"One individual at a time," Snoke said musingly.


	15. Full Responsibility

**A/N: I have discovered recently that the galactic standard for a cycle (a day) is four six-hour shifts. I have all along divided up the First Order's time into three eight-hour shifts. I'll be sticking with that as an unintended difference. Shift one starts at galactic standard time of eight AM. Shift two at four PM. Shift three at midnight. The usual work schedule is that you have a work shift, an off shift, and then a sleep shift. Emergency protocols and active combat puts everyone automatically to double work shifts with an allocation of stims.**

 **Working two shifts on a regular basis is considered bizarre behavior. Usually no one will stop you, but even in the First Order, they can't require you to do it outside of emergency or combat. Those who willingly work two shifts do so because they have no life, they're workaholics, are especially driven, or all three. Other than the Starkiller project, no one in the First Order was ever able to keep entire teams on that schedule (and still be productive at it) for long periods of time.**

* * *

"Who did this?" Snoke's voice was soft, but Hux had heard that tone too often not to know what it meant. Even if he'd heard it from Brendol, not Snoke, not until now. It was not good. He was looking for a target, winding himself up. There was a beating coming and Hux knew it.

What was he even asking, though? "Wh- I- I did." Hux had a moment's hesitation before changing his mind about what to say. It didn't matter what Snoke meant. He didn't want the creature's attention on anyone but himself. His team – Hux's engineering team – had been hastily assembled for Snoke's unscheduled visit to Starkiller. If that meant Hux had to wave a flag a flag in front of the rancor's face to keep him distracted from them, then he would.

"You did not," Snoke told him in an unimpressed aside. He looked past him at the score or so of assembled engineers, most of whom looked concerned and perplexed. A few were worried. Cheskar looked terrified, because he was the only one among them who'd witnessed Snoke's temper before. The others had been told, but it was a thing that was difficult to understand until you were directly effected by it. Snoke asked, "Who removed these crystals from in situ? Who contaminated them with their essence? Who touched them with their bare hands?" Snoke's voice raised with each question.

They all had. Hux knew this, too. Both of the surface teams had gone down to the cave when it was clear how large a void the excavator had broken into. They'd explored it with lights, laughing at the novelty of it as a break from months of tedium. It was a dry cave and the ground was safe enough to traverse. There was a little falling and sliding involved but after being trapped in a hab module working two shifts a day for months, no one cared. They'd gone a little stir-crazy. It was understandable. The smattering of crystals they'd found had been a treasure passed from hand to hand as they admired them and speculated about what they might fetch in the Republic.

No one had ever told them (or Hux) that you shouldn't just pick kyber up and look at it. It was extraordinarily stable. They already knew there was nothing toxic in the cave unless you started eating the porous stone laced with mineral deposits. There was no reason to wear protective gear or even gloves. There was something appealing about touching the crystals – Hux had felt it – enough to make him understand why Jedi insisted the stones were psychically active.

It hadn't occurred to him that Snoke believed in that idiocy. It should have. He knew that was a mistake now.

"Anything they did was at my command," Hux said strongly, raising his voice right back at Snoke. "I am in charge. I take full responsibility. Anything you'd do to them should fall on me!"

If a nerf broke free from the pen – you didn't shoot the nerf and panic the rest of the herd. You didn't shoot it at all. You just drove it back in the pen. You fixed the fence. And you went on your way. He would get no useful work out of his team if they were too frightened to make a move. They were working tirelessly for Hux. They were effective. Efficient. He was protecting his assets. He was acting selfishly, as always, because that was the only language and frame of reference he had for explaining what he was doing by putting himself physically between Snoke and his team.

The look Snoke gave him was highly amused. "You offer yourself in their place? Why not the guilty party?"

"Because I am the guilty party!" Snoke raised a disbelieving brow at him, but Hux was gratified he had at least distracted Snoke from the rest. Hux said, "They can't work for the Order if you kill them."

"And without you?"

He knew what the question meant – without Hux, if Snoke killed him for the misstep of his subordinates, then would the Order prosper? Would they continue? Would they win? Hux had thought, from the beginning of his memory, that he'd lead the Order to victory. Or at least play a pivotal role in it. His father had said as much. It was believed the emperor had thought so and thus Gallius Rax had singled out Armitage to come with his father.

Armitage had believed it himself. Maybe this was the role he got to play – giving his life so the engineering team would continue. It was pivotal enough, he supposed, even if it wasn't what he'd imagined in his childish fantasies. He lifted his chin. "The project is progressing well, Leader Snoke."

"You think I can do without you? Hm. Maybe so."

He supposed that was the end, then. It hurt more than he had expected it to. Hux had no words or ability to convey just how much what Snoke did to him hurt in the way of sheer pain. It was like Snoke activated every nerve cell Hux had and directed them all to tell him they were experiencing the worst agony they'd ever felt. Where he had more nerves – his privates, his face, his hands, his feet – the effect was equivalently more pronounced. There was a deep aching within him as well, what he imagined a gut wound or maybe even rape to feel like – a dull, huge, interior feeling. It wasn't as sharp as the rest, but his brain categorized it as more important, more visceral. He dissociated immediately. Everything glazed over.

He noted, clinically, that he wasn't experiencing more pain that his body was capable of experiencing. There was no supernatural aspect to this (other than the Force itself). He supposed this meant Snoke couldn't hurt him worse. At least, not this way. He knew there were other routes – emotional, self-inflicted, soul-wrenching. But he didn't feel very bad about his choice at the moment, despite knowing that if he was granted so much as a sliver of relief, a tiny crack of opportunity, he (or at least his body – he felt distant from it at the moment) would beg, plead, and humiliate himself. He decided he was lucky Snoke wasn't allowing that.

His body wasn't doing anything too obnoxious, either. He wasn't screaming, but he'd had to breathe. It came out in a rattle and in as a gasp. He'd collapsed and he felt that was ignominious but understandable. Maybe it conveyed what was happening better to the witnesses than if he'd kept his feet. He couldn't imagine that it looked like much of anything from their point of view. Maybe they just thought he was being choked. 'Armitage Hux, choked to death for being selfish and stupid.' Well. He couldn't see or hear them. He felt like he was floating. Somewhere along the line, Snoke had taken his senses.

Then he was falling. Or it felt like he was. He hit the floor. His head hit it, too – a hard, solid clobbering that put him back in his body more abruptly than he would have liked. His senses were back. He was shivering. And making an undignified noise. It took him longer than he wanted to figure out how to stop that.

He lifted his head, still too dazed to make anything out. Every shift of his clothing against his skin set off a cascade of pins and needles. He felt like his body was buzzing with paresthesia. He focused on his breathing – trying to control just that one thing. Blood dripped from somewhere, plinking on the shiny floor to his right. He supposed it was his.

"Take more care in future," Snoke said somewhere above and to his left, "or I will choose a new director from within your number." Snoke wasn't speaking to him. Also, he wasn't a director, although it would be an appropriate title for any technician advanced to lead the project so in that respect it made sense. (Wanting to quibble about titles being the first thing his mind managed to put together coherently.) It occurred to him finally that he didn't seem to be dead.

There was the shuffling of feet. A moment later, Snoke said simply, "No." More shuffling mixed with two sets of strong, heavy treads approaching him.

He was lifted under the arms by real, live human beings. Or probably human. The red-clad guards dragged him to the door and dumped him in the hallway. The guards disappeared. His team joined him. By then, Hux was starting to get some control over his twitching limbs.

He was helped to his feet by hands he didn't want on him. Their very touch made him nauseous. "I'm fine." He staggered. He was dizzy. He didn't want to be touched. At all. Ever. Every over-excited nerve ending still had a lot to say about the abuse they'd just gone through, or so his brain was telling him. Hux tried to tell himself he hadn't felt anything in a real way. It was an illusion. Jedi were notorious for their mind tricks. That's all this was – a farce. But it was a stubborn one.

Cheskar had hold of him – an arm around his waist and the other on Hux's forearm. The rest of the group was crowded around, talking over each other. The sounds blended into the background for Hux.

"Don't touch me! I'm fine!" he insisted, tearing his arm away from Cheskar.

"You can't stand. You're bleeding," Cheskar said. Lanlisa was on Hux's other side, trying to hold his arm. He wrested it away from her as well.

"I'm fine, I said!" His breathing was getting short. His stomach was churning. He shook both of them off with renewed effort. He had to get free of them. He couldn't stand the contact. He wasn't all that happy about the feel of his own clothes, but they would stay for now. He shoved the two away more rudely than was strictly called for. He wavered, but stood unassisted. "See? Fine."

"Okay," Cheskar said quietly. They waved at the rest. Everyone quieted. "You're bleeding."

Hux looked at himself and spotted it. He traced the trail to his cheek, then temple, then into his hair. He looked at his hand uncertainly. "It's alright." He tasted it, realized he probably shouldn't have done that in front of people, and straightened, trying to act like he'd done nothing odd. The whole engineering team was looking at him. "It's alright," he said again.

Allcasa said, "We should get him to the medbay on the _Finalizer_."

"No!" Hux said. "There's nothing wrong with me!" He turned carefully and sized up where he was – in the hallway outside the main conference room. Snoke was inside that room.

"I'm not sure he's accurately self-assessing," Allcasa said. Cheskar shook their head decisively.

Hux gave them both a brief, scathing look. "I'll go to my quarters and clean up. Someone needs to see if Leader Snoke needs assistance in my absence."

There was a beat of silence. Saycor murmured, "He just threw you out. He's on his own, right?"

"A commanding officer's misbehavior does not absolve underlings of the duty to obey. Not that Snoke misbehaved. He may … do as he wishes." Hux wasn't even sure if use of the Force constituted an assault. Other than a knock on the head, what had happened to him hadn't left a mark, so what could he say of it? He wasn't sure how to put this into reasonable words.

Cheskar saved him from needing to by volunteering, "I'll do it."

"Thank you." Hux looked at his blood again. He was having a hard time orienting, but the most important thing seemed to be getting away from all these people – from questions he didn't know how to answer and contact that was difficult to avoid. They were still worryingly close to him. He picked a direction and began to walk that way, hoping it was the right one for his quarters. After a hurried exchange, a couple of the team began to trail after him. He turned, unholstered his blaster, and pointed it at them. Both Fabica and Jarkame jumped back, hands up. "Do not follow me," Hux told them flatly. "Leave me alone."

Jarkame nodded. "Yes, yes. Will do. Sir." He took Fabica's arm and pulled her backward with him.

Hux holstered his weapon and continued on. His room on the base was the same as everyone else's, except it was his alone. He still had the stacked beds so two could conceivably bunk here. He found a towel he'd used to clean his boots with (bootblacking droids weren't available on-planet) and pressed it to his head. The rest was a blur.

There was a chime at his door. Hux jerked his fingers out of his mouth. When had they gotten there? "Yes?" Had he been sitting here on his bunk daydreaming the whole time? How much time was that?

"Cheskar, sir."

"Um … Open." It wasn't just Cheskar. Jarkame loitered in the background. Hux looked at him suspiciously.

Cheskar waved Jarkame off. "Yeah, it's okay." Jarkame nodded and walked away. Cheskar came in and sat down with their back against the wall opposite of where Hux was on the bunk. Their knees were drawn up in front of them. To Hux, they said, "I thought maybe we'd be hauling you off to medbay."

"I'm fine." Hux looked at the towel in his hands. There was less blood on it than he thought typical for a scalp wound. He supposed he might have been pressing the towel to the wrong spot. "What happened?"

"Not much. I went back in. He was, uh, polite? Obviously I'm alive and stuff."

"He vented his spleen. That's what they really want."

"What's that? Who's 'they'? I thought he was male."

"He is, as far as I know. I meant people like Snoke. Powerful people. They get angry. Want to express it. Hurt someone. I saw it coming. Once they're done, they're happy for a while." He wiped his fingers on the towel and touched around on his head. "It's a pattern."

Cheskar gripped uneasily on their knees. "Did you know he wouldn't kill you?"

"No. I thought he would." He found the gob of sticky blood in his hair that marked the small scalp laceration. "I thought he had."

"What _did_ he do to you?"

"Nothing."

More uneasy knee-gripping from Cheskar. "Well. Okay. He told me how to handle the crystals in future. Basically, um, any we're going to sell, we can do whatever we want to. But the one's we're keeping for weapons need to be scooped out mechanically with the material they're in and then sealed and isolated. No touching. No … essence contamination. I'm not sure I understand what he was trying to tell me. Some of it wasn't … understandable."

Hux smiled at Cheskar ruefully. "I can imagine."

"He did it … mentally."

"Mentally?"

"Yeah. In my head. Like … telepathically. That's the Force, right? Or can his species do that?"

"I have no idea. I was reprimanded for letting my thoughts wander to his slippers. I'm not about to consider something more personal about him. Or anything of strategic significance."

"Oh." Cheskar was silent for a moment. "Are you trying to say something … right now?"

They were smart. Hux gave another rueful smile. "No. I can't. Neither can you. Don't go down that path, Cheskar. I would prefer you to remain alive."

"Oh. Because he's been in my head? Can he read our minds here?"

"I believe so. I have had evidence of it. I know his attention wanders often during my meetings with him." Hux swallowed. "If he's not paying attention to me, then he's paying attention to others. Elsewhere. If he does that routinely, then he could be looking and listening anywhere, at any time. But it also indicates he has limits on how much he can pay attention to."

In a quieter voice, Hux said, "He is my commanding officer and I will do my duty in good faith. As should you." Hux stood. "I need to get cleaned up."

Cheskar stood as well. "Is there anything I can do for you?"

"Keep the project on track."


	16. Promotion

Hux stewed over the rating to assign to the primary oscillator intake. If he made it as robust as the rest of the system, then it was less likely to break down. Venting was a critical function, so this was obviously important. On the other hand, that was why they had redundancies to take over after it failed. If he made it too robust, then something else might fail instead that had fewer redundancies, increasing the chances of a cascade failure. He would be disastrous to underestimate this much energy. He had nothing comparable to relate it to in recent galactic history. Even the Death Stars were poor analogies when it came to the phantom quintessence of a star.

He leaned back in his chair, rubbing at his sore eyes. It felt like he'd been at this for days and that wasn't entirely inaccurate. The joint manager's council had submitted this latest draft of the 'final' plans for Starkiller Base to him, along with options. They reason why they couldn't select the option and move forward without his input was because the option chosen depended on how the weapon would ultimately be used.

If they were to fire it once or twice at full power and then never again (or at least not without doing a full evaluation and refurbishment between firings), then one should make things modular, easily upgraded and altered, and relatively light-duty. This was typical of planetary defense systems, expected to sit idle for decades or even centuries between unplanned use. Some were never used at all outside of drills. But if Snoke intended to take Starkiller into combat on a regular basis, using it as a mobile battle station, then everything needed to be overbuilt. One would not necessarily get time or supplies to do repairs, so the more rugged the better.

A message was delivered to his inbox.

But what was it Snoke intended? He seemed to think the battle with the New Republic would be quick and decisive, if Hux's understanding was correct. Could he rely on that, though? Snoke didn't actually _know_ how the battle was going to. He was just guessing through whatever Force wizardry he had. It would be foolhardy to rely on that. Overdesigning looked to be the way to go. It would take longer to build it that way, though. The First Order's very existence might depend on striking first, before the New Republic recognized the magnitude of the threat they posed. The base was useless if they managed to destroy it before it was finished.

Hux tapped the message open.

He wondered if his desire to have Starkiller Base set up as intermittent, light-duty use was because of his fantasies of using it as the ultimate trooper training station, or building industrial complexes on it similar to what Snoke was having installed in the _Supremacy,_ so there were two of the things? Neither of these had Snoke's blessing or any indication he wanted them for this project. They were just things Hux wanted.

Hux rubbed his eyes again and blinked at the message. Surely he'd misread it, distracted as he was by his ponderings about the base.

 _From: Chief of Staff Brumos Fuseb_

 _To: Armitage Hux_

 _You are hereby promoted to general. See attached certifications and documents for your records. Please remit your preferences for wording of an official announcement to be made at the end of the next cycle._

Hux had this dreadful, bizarre feeling that someone was playing a prank on him. He'd heard Veska had been retired from Snoke's service and was currently in some manner of evaluation to see if she was fit for continuing duty. Hux had been asked discreetly by his personnel manager if he was interested in adding her to his own staff. He had tentatively agreed. So it meant seeing a new name as Snoke's chief of staff was not surprising. He still didn't know the guy.

And this … this was not how promotions were processed. Certainly not as a general!

He stood up, transferred the message to his datapad, and stalked off down the hallway. Cheskar was in the lounge, alone given the lateness of the hour. They were eating grapes while sitting in front of an engaged holochess board. The pieces were strangely set up, but that wasn't new. Cheskar often did odd things in their time off, making up non-standard simulations for their own amusement. Hux handed the datapad to Cheskar, who read it.

Hux looked at the game board. The override light was on, so yes, Cheskar was doing something other than playing holochess. The pieces were arranged in trios in the corners of the board – one big, one smaller but still major piece, and one pawn. The remaining pieces clustered in the middle of the board, at double occupancy in some of the squares.

Cheskar looked up at him. "Congratulations?"

"I … I don't know. Do you think it's authentic? Or a hoax?"

"A hoax would go to more trouble to make it look like exactly what you'd expect. They wouldn't make it look like a jotted down note – 'oh yeah, by the way, promote that guy and let him know about it; now let's get back to the real business of the evening …'" They handed the datapad back.

Hux felt weak in the knees. "So you think this is real?" Cheskar nodded. Hux went on, "A general? General Hux? I have my father's title. That's going to be even more confusing now. This is really happening?"

"Guess so … General. Want a grape?"

Hux looked. He picked one up. It wasn't an extruded simulacrum, but rather the real thing. "You have actual fruit. Where did you get these?"

Cheskar waggled their brows. "We're getting freight and supplies in here all the time. It's pretty easy to slip in a box or two of extra stuff now that it's not all conduit, struts, droids, and ore."

"You do remember that meeting you went to where someone was killed for following New Republic sports teams, right?" But Hux ate the grape anyway. It was delicious. He looked at the bowl with appreciation and took a second one.

Cheskar grinned to see that. "This is a productivity tool. Like the taurine I've been getting for you. You knew that stuff wasn't regulation, right?"

"I had no idea and I still don't." Hux smiled tightly. "You live dangerously, I see. I can respect that." He sighed as he turned back to the datapad. "I suppose I need to think of some things to say in the announcement."

"Who sees it?"

"The announcement?"

"Yeah."

Hux shook his head. "Only my chain of command and anyone directly effected by it. But for a general that's quite a lot of people." He thought for a moment. "I'm barely thirty. I'll be the youngest general the First Order has ever had. Which isn't saying a lot, as we haven't had scores of them. Peavey will be even more annoyed." Hux smiled briefly at that.

"Does that make you part of the High Command?"

"No, it does not. Not unless Snoke's somehow taken over their appointment power. The thing is," Hux lowered the pad to his side, "a promotion of this level is supposed to be reviewed by a board and authorized well before any announcement. It's not done rashly or on a whim."

"Why don't you ask an attorney?"

"Ask them what? If this is legal?"

"Sure. If you're a general, you should probably have one dedicated, you know? You're going to have an allocation to hire personal staff, right?"

Hux thought about that, nodding. "I suppose you're right. I like that idea. My father never had one. The law didn't matter to him. He did so much that was-" This was not a subject he should elaborate on to Cheskar. "It would reassure me to be certain everything was aboveboard."

"For what my opinion is worth, I don't think it's a whim," Cheskar said. "Our project is halfway done, we're still mostly on schedule, you have three star destroyers at your command, and you meet, like, weekly or more with the leader of the entire First Order. If he decides you're a general, then you're a general."

"I worry about why he might decide that."

"It's above my pay grade," Cheskar said, using a phrase passed down by the older members of the First Order, from back when people were actually paid. "How's the final plan review going? That's more my speed."

Hux stared off to the side for a moment. "I want you to overdesign. The last two Death Stars were shot out of space. We can't expect Starkiller to function without every attempt at retaliation by our enemies. It's a target. We have to build it that way."

"As you say."


	17. Telecommuting

Hux was staring in the mirror, making a last adjustment to his hair before heading out for the day. He was reciting his schedule when he felt distinctly watched. Not alone. The face in the mirror, caught out of the corner of his eye, was Snoke's, not his own. Hux jerked back, his comb clattering into the sink as he grabbed at his knife. No, the face was his own now. He'd heard of 'growing up to be your father', but Snoke? He had the spooky, unreal feeling this was a nightmare – he was still asleep and only dreaming he was getting ready for his shift.

 _It is not a nightmare._

That was not his thought, but it was in his head. It was Snoke's voice. He whirled, looking around himself. The knife was in hand now, although he cautioned himself to be careful. If it _was_ Snoke, he didn't need to be stabbing him. But he wasn't convinced of that yet.

 _Your concern for my welfare is laudable. This is telepathy. You are familiar with it._

Hux swallowed and straightened slightly. Hux's new quarters on the _Finalizer_ might have been larger than he'd ever enjoyed in the past, but there was still no place within them Snoke might be hiding. He supposed this was exactly what Snoke was telling him it was – a Force power being used to speak with him. It verified his suspicions that Snoke could read minds at a vast distance. Apparently, he could also speak.

"Yes? Sir?"

 _You need not speak aloud. Discretion is one of many benefits of this mode of communication. As well, your time will no longer be consumed in transit to and from my location, unless I ask specifically for your presence. You may cancel all future project reports and status updates with me. Henceforth, I will reach you in this manner when I have need._

 _Oh._ Hux wasn't sure what to make of that. It had consequences and repercussions he wanted to think through.

 _Now. Submit._

But there was no time for such thoughts. It would be rude to entertain them with Snoke … here. _What?_

Something slid inside of him, behind the sinuses of his face. There was a pressure and a sensation. His mind interpreted it as an attachment, something he couldn't free himself from. His shoulders jerked and his hands came to his face instinctively. One of them still held the blade.

 _Put that down. You cannot sever this tie. Only I can do that. This is an attunement._

Falteringly, he set the knife on the counter. _An attunement? What if I don't submit? Or attune?_ He didn't want to have thought that aloud – it sounded too much like defiance – but the thought was there anyway. It was more about concern and alarm than trying to fight.

 _Then the likelihood you will be damaged by the process increases._

 _But I can't stop it?_

 _No._

 _Oh._ There was that feeling again and his hands went to his face just as involuntarily as before. He gasped. He went to his knees. He shuddered. It wasn't due to pain so much. It was that it felt so invasive, like Snoke was next to him or inside of him. Like if he looked off to the right in his own brain, that the being on that hemisphere was not himself. Reality as he knew it dropped away and some other creature dwelt there – the ineffable manifestation in the Force of Snoke himself.

A directive to submit implied that resistance was possible. As he had no idea how to do that, he also had no idea of how to submit. He was not being given time to adjust and consider the matter, which he assumed was intentional. Snoke must want him off-balance like this. He balled his fists where they rested on his knees, knuckles whitening as something entrenched itself within his mind.

The pressure receded, but the feeling of having been violated remained. It was like there was something under his skin he wanted to dig out but it was in his own brain. His gut kept twitching. He felt alone, but with this foreign thing still in residence, like a collar around his throat. _Snoke? Hello? Snoke?_ "Snoke?" Hux's voice was raspy and quiet.

Whatever Snoke had just done to him, his emotional reaction to it mattered to Snoke not at all. Hux suspected it was no more to Snoke than the feelings of a nerf herder to nerfs he'd applied a brand to. The irrational part of his mind linked this event with being promoted – the only good part was it resolved his lurking dread that something awful was going to happen as a result of that perfunctory advancement.

Shakily, he got to his feet, replaced his knife in the scabbard, and picked up his comb. He glanced at the mirror furtively, building up the courage to look directly at it. It was just him. But he felt contaminated. He had to hold down the desire to retch. It wouldn't help. Instead, he washed his face and restyled his hair. There was nothing else to be done about it.


	18. Macro Management

**A/N: None of them have ever seen a Star Wars movie or a Jedi mind trick. Snoke tends not to use them, instead preferring to rely on rational self-interest (i.e., 'I will torture you to death if you don't do what I say'). Cheskar is not particularly weak-willed, but there's nothing about what Hux is telling them to do that they're inclined to resist. It's more like a suggestion.**

* * *

Hux's greatcoat billowed behind him as he strode across the forward extraction chamber of the main excavation. It was warm here, but perverse as it seemed, the coat would insulate him from the heat for a while by the same mechanism by which it blocked out cold. They had long since begun to dig at depths untenable for prolonged human exposure. This chamber was the last with environmental processing, where an unprotected human such as himself would survive, albeit uncomfortably.

Cheskar was waiting for him, standing next to the crouching, crab-like shape of what was essentially an enormous portage droid. So many things on this project had baffling scales, like the thing the droid was carrying upon its broad, flat back. It was a kyber crystal – a single, massive kyber crystal about the size of a low couch.

It was difficult to see, as it was still heaped up with sandy, chalky kyberite ore. The cream and tan of the earlier diggings had darkened to grey and reddish brown. As he neared, he could see a darker, glassy band of the crystal itself. The smaller ones they'd found had been white or clear. A few had been smoky. This one looked black. He gave Cheskar a worried look. Cheskar handed him a long-handled broom, one used by the workers to clean equipment.

"Let's see what we've got," Cheskar said.

Together, they swept it clear, exposing the thing's form. It was roughly capsule-shaped with a bifurcation at one end in a lop-sided Y. The lines were not clean, but marred with eruptions and occlusions. The two of them backed up out of the dust cloud from their efforts, giving it a good look. It wasn't pretty.

It was a dark grey overall. Portions were clear. Portions were shot through with black. Where the black touched the surface, it formed a crusted nodule with the appearance of tar, like something had oozed from the interior.

"I'd read they came this big," Cheskar said in quiet awe. "Never thought I'd see one with my own eyes."

"There was that green one I showed you the holo of. It was five or six times this size. Perhaps more. And it was beautiful, naturally faceted with a clean lattice, which this one does not have. This looks like two crystals fused together … badly."

"It might not be much to look at, but I can feel it. Oh wow, can I feel it."

Hux gave Cheskar a side-eye. No one had forgotten the lesson about not touching these things. That's why he and Cheskar were evaluating this one personally, before it got anywhere near the rest of the personnel on the base.

There were several thousand people on the planet now, all engaged in various stages of construction. Hux had lost track of how many or who they were, but he had no doubt most of them didn't know to keep their hands off the crystals. He'd confiscated one as long as his finger off an electrician just the week before that had simply fallen out of the wall.

"Can you feel it?" Cheskar asked unnecessarily. They wiped at the sweat off their brow.

"Yes. Of course I can. I want to touch it, but I'm not going to." He said that pointedly.

Cheskar shifted their weight back and forth on their feet. "I don't want to _touch_ it. I want to fornicate with it. I want to sleep on it. I want to lick it." They made a hissing sound through their teeth.

Hux's brows rose in puzzlement. "Do you need to excuse yourself? That's bizarre."

Cheskar grinned at him. "Only if you're leaving me alone with that!" At Hux's increasingly incredulous expression, Cheskar toned it down. "I'm joking. Sort of."

"You'd better be entirely joking." Hux's voice was serious, like a reprimand.

"I am." Cheskar balled their fists and put them in their armpits as though to physically restrain themselves from doing anything. They rocked up and down on their heels. "It has an energy. You're feeling it, too, right?"

"Yes, I am," Hux confirmed again. "But it doesn't feel _right_." Hux walked around it, giving it a wide berth as he did. He sent a pointed look to Cheskar and the engineer followed him. Hux didn't want to let Cheskar out of his sight with the thing.

 _Your perception is accurate. On both counts._

Hux stumbled and caught himself at the sound (?) of Snoke's voice in his head.

"You okay?" Cheskar asked.

"Fine." Hux made a show of looking back at the floor accusingly, although there was nothing there he could have tripped over. _You're here? Why?_ He worried he'd done something wrong. _No one has touched it. I've seen to it._

 _I am aware. The crystals within this planet called to me from across the galaxy. How do you think I was able to target the expeditionary force? The moment you unearth one of these, the song changes timbre. It rings out differently._

 _Ah_. So that was how Snoke had managed to show up twice, unexpected, mere hours after excavation of the smaller crystals. Guiltily, he wondered if he was supposed to have punished the electrician. All he'd done was order training for anyone coming in contact with the planet's excavated crust and put the rock in a box in his quarters, expecting he would eventually decide what to do with it. He continued making a slow circuit of the larger one they'd found. _Will you be coming to see this one?_

 _No need. I see it now, through your eyes._

 _I see._

 _This one is flawed. You may use it for calibration runs and whatever practice exercises you deem prudent. Destroy it if you must. I care not._

 _Can we touch it?_

 _It will twist your mind as it already works on that of your engineer._ Hux snapped his eyes to Cheskar, who still looked anxious. Snoke continued, _Use it to determine what shielding is necessary to physically protect your operators, since it is impractical to recruit and train those who are naturally resistant._ There was a pause. _Even an imperfect instrument might be useful,_ Snoke thought with a pointed mental reference to Hux himself _. Continue your efforts. There are greater wonders yet to be revealed._

There was no more. After a long enough wait, Hux hazarded, _Sir? Snoke? Leader Snoke?_ When no response was forthcoming, he turned to Cheskar. "Let us withdraw. We'll have the droid move it into a cargo container and see if that's sufficient to block whatever mental effect it has. If it isn't, we'll wrap the container in electrostatically charged netting and see if that works."

Cheskar looked after it longingly as they walked toward the other side of the room, where a long cable snaked over to a control panel that sat on a skid. Every day, they dug forward and moved the temporary walls that made up this chamber. Behind it, other droids and human workers put up a permanent framework for what would eventually be a central corridor big enough to fly a command shuttle through with wings extended. They were miles beneath the planet's surface, but there was nothing beyond the ceiling but air. They were in the great crevasse that would eventually bisect the world.

"It stirs you?" Hux asked.

"Yes? Doesn't it, you?"

"No. I feel it, but no. I am not … stirred. It doesn't feel right. It's not that I don't feel right, but the crystal doesn't feel right. Not to me."

"Huh."

"Were there no others found between the ones leftover after the knights and this one?"

"Just all the shard and trace we've been pulling out – stuff the size of a grain of sand up to your fingernail. And that one that jumped out at Basingi." That was the electrician. "I still think that means something." Hux shrugged. He did not care or believe a rock had 'chosen' one of the electricians to bond with. "I guess you're selling all of that?"

"The shards have been passed on to Snoke's bursar. I think we're selling them Kuat-Entralla to pay down our debt for the destroyers. I haven't included the other yet. It's worth … a lot. It might be a useful bargaining chip at some point." His thoughts had betrayed it to Snoke, but Snoke had said nothing of it. Hux assumed that meant he was free to do with it as he pleased. Which meant he'd probably offer it in exchange for expediting materials he needed for the base.

"Ah. Financial stuff." Cheskar nodded. "Lanlisa was the one who let me know the geological composition had changed. The kyberite was crusting up and we were running into voids. That's the same thing that happened before when we started finding fully-formed crystals."

"This one was in a cave as well?"

"Not exactly. More just a seam. If it had been in a cave, the excavation droid might have seen it first and notified us. As it was, its scanners noticed the density shift and it dug it out. I don't know if we have caves this far down."

"Well, we should get moving on building the faceting equipment. I'll want to test it out on that one."

"You want to cut it up? But it's beautiful!"

Hux stopped them with a touch to the arm, moving directly in front of them to face them. "Cheskar. Listen to me. It's just a rock." Hux held up one hand in emphasis. Cheskar's life and possibly their sanity depended on this (quite outside what Snoke might do to them, or to Hux).

Cheskar stared at him, seemingly on the verge of saying something, then they relaxed. "It's just a rock."

"You're not going to touch it."

"I'm not going to touch it."

Hux hesitated, wondering if he was being mocked given the toneless way Cheskar was repeating his words. Hux nodded. "We have work to get to."

"We have work to get to."

Hux snorted and abandoned the focused, serious tone he'd been using. "You _are_ mocking me, aren't you?"

"No." Cheskar straightened a little, blinking. "It's a … um, good idea. Just a rock. Don't touch it. Get to work. I got it. I can do that." Their voice sounded normal enough now.

Hux shook his head and rolled his eyes. "Then get to it. I'm not leaving until I'm sure we have a functional containment system that doesn't leave my best project engineer talking about wanting to mate with the blasted thing."

"Alright, alright," Cheskar chuckled, heading over to a comm panel so they could get a cargo container brought down. "All work, all the time. I'm on it."

Hux turned and looked across the chamber toward the crystal. "One day it will all be over here," he said to himself. "Some of us, at least, will get to live in the galaxy made by this magnificent weapon. If we manage to get it finished in time."


	19. Water Cooler Conversations

**A/N: Patrick O'Kane (the actor for Captain Tritt Opan) is 50 at time of TFA/TLJ. I tend to say that people in a galaxy far, far away are longer-lived than people in the real world, if the character has regular access to high quality health care. Tritt would have been on his first assignment during the loss of DS-1 (the first Death Star) and a five-year veteran when all goes down at DS2/Battle of Endor. Interestingly, Armitage Hux was born the same year the DS-1 blew up. Peavey is ten or so years older than Opan. Ships, events, and places listed in this chapter are canon, aside from Opan's past as an intelligence officer. Also, don't ask me how a Navy officer like Opan is on the staff of an Army general like Hux. That's canon as well, so that's how it is.**

* * *

"Where were you when it all went down?" Peavey asked. He was heavily into the liquor he had unwisely allowed Captain Tritt Opan to supply for their private conversation. It was strong and high quality, but the alcohol was only there to cover the interrogation serum.

"Which time?" Opan had taken a hefty dose of a neutralizing agent beforehand, a gross concoction of charcoal and soda, but even so he felt more loquacious than normal.

Peavey smiled slightly. "The first. Are you old enough for that?"

Tritt showed him a few teeth. It wasn't a smile. "Mimban. I was a petty officer at the time. Fresh out of the academy. Just in time to get shoved in the mud."

"I've heard that was a rough place. What was the Navy doing there?"

"Air support for what was left of the poor fucks in the trenches. All I was doing was making sure the mechs had all the nuts and bolts they needed. That, and trying not to drown." This was not true. He'd been fresh out of the academy all right, but he'd been in intelligence, not supply. There had been no shortage of work for his specialty.

"Ah. No claim of heroics?"

Tritt laughed. "What would I want those for? Good heroes are dead heroes. I just did my job. The DS-1 blew and we were out of there. Reassigned. I was on Arkanis when the second one went. I was, um, conscripted onto the _Eviscerator_ when the imperial forces were pulled out ahead of the Siege, after someone higher up decided the place was a lost cause."

"Didn't they lose the _Eviscerator_ over Jakku just a few months later?"

"Yeah. Speaking of lost causes." Tritt took a long drink. " _Some_ people made it to escape pods." He tipped his half-empty glass in Peavey's direction. "You can go down with the ship. Not me. Drink up. You're falling behind."

Peavey grimaced, but drank. "Who picked you up?"

"The _Acidity_."

"Hm. Where did they go? I don't recall the provenance for that one."

"Queluhan Nebula. Sloane met up with us later and we integrated with the First Order. Wasn't called that then."

"No, it was still the Imperial Fleet in those days." Peavey leaned back, saying it in a dreamy way. Clearly he wished it was still the Imperial Fleet.

"Yep. Then the First Order was formed and we all got commissioned. Officers for life, eh?" Tritt gave Peavey a knowing smile, because the conversion had been one from career soldiers earning a wage to mandatory service until death or victory. Not everyone was on board with it, but there were precious few choices offered.

Peavey positively growled at the reminder.

Opan continued, "Once that happened, I looked up Brendol Hux because I'd run across him in social circles on Arkanis – playing cards, mostly – and I ended up transferring to his staff for a while. We drifted apart toward the end. I was a lieutenant in charge of supplies for the Downs and he was either running that academy or out slave harvesting. He pulled me along on a couple of those."

This was another lie. Tritt had spent most of his time afield, cultivating ties with the slave traders Brendol bought from. But the job on paper? That was supply, same as his cover story for Mimban. Brendol Hux and his allies had seen to it that what amounted to Internal Affairs or Internal Security was not publicly known. But the easiest way to fend off questions about his past was to get his version of the story out first. No one bothered to ask if they thought they already had the answers.

Peavey said, "And now you're working for his son. Did you look him up, too? Come looking for another Hux to serve? He was crazed, you know – the older one."

"Oh, I know." Tritt shook his head though. "Armitage called me. Offered me a step up. I'd made commander. Now I could make captain. Plus, I was tired of being stuck planetside." Also, he'd had few side jobs once Snoke showed up – eliminating half his customers and scaring the crap out of the rest. As Armitage had pointed out, having a telepath in charge of things changed the game.

"What do you think of him?" Peavey asked. "The boy?"

Tritt shrugged. He gave Peavey a sly smile.

Peavey smiled back. "Yeah, that's what I thought." Tritt's smile turned into a feral grin and Peavey laughed, seeing what he wanted there. "How do you take him seriously?" he said loosely. There was no way a sober and non-drugged Edrison Peavey would have ever said this much to someone he knew so little.

"I knew him when he was a kid," Tritt said. "Pinch-faced and vicious, no manners to speak of, spoke like an illiterate sand rat. Which didn't match the rest of him at all. He was always in a uniform of some kind, hair in order, clean enough. So until he opened his mouth, you might think he was just another kid."

"He hasn't changed much," Peavey said with a rueful belly chuckle. "Not underneath. You can see it. He's a desperate little popinjay. Parading around with no sense for how others see him. He acts ridiculous." He pretended to pound the table once. "I ask again - how do you work for him? You don't strike me as a lickspittle."

"Oh, I just let it go. Like you said, his father was the same way. It's no skin off my back. How much does he bother you?"

Peavey snorted, deep enough in his cups to answer without resistance. "It's not the orders he gives. It's just the look of him. That sneer! He's always looking down his nose at everyone and for no reason at all that I can tell. He acts like we should all be impressed by him, but there's nothing about him that's better than anyone else. He just happened to be the son of a general with a few more connections than most of us."

"Maybe so," Tritt agreed. "Brass begets brass."

Peavey gave one of several routine answers for the call-and-response: "And iron sharpens iron." Then he went on, "Snoke seems to have taken a liking to him. Though from what I've heard, that's not an honor anyone wants." Peavey sat forward in a sudden lurch as he got an idea. "There's another rumor I've heard – that when they get Snoke's flagship done, they're going to gut the rest of the fleet, take _fifty_ percent – _half!_ – of the working crews and transfer them to this new ship, the _Supremacy_ , and backfill the fleet with subadults. Subadults! Have you heard that?"

Tritt nodded, although he had, as a matter of fact, not heard that rumor. But it matched up with some of the curriculum changes Governor Cridan had been pushing for cadets on the Downs.

"Sub-adults. Subs! Do you know what a sub is?"

"Yep." Tritt gave him a smug, satisfied look.

Peavey blinked at him, hesitating. "You have a dirty mind, sir." He pointed at him like one might point at a naughty child.

"And proud of it."

Peavey seemed to consider that, then went on undaunted. "Well, they might be that, too. Who knows? But they're a _sub_ standard _sub_ stitute for a real soldier, that's what they are. I'm expected to put this ship in their hands? Half of my crew to be children? Under a general who's not much better? Pah!" Peavey was getting loud and wobbly. Tritt knew he needed to move this along to what he really needed to know while the man was still capable of stringing together words.

"You ever think about doing anything about it?"

"What?" Peavey looked genuinely confused. "Do? What could I do? Send them back?"

"No," Opan shrugged one shoulder. "I don't know. Just something. Anything."

"Uh …" Peavey looked at his glass dumbly. "This stuff's really strong."

"Yeah." Opan helpfully poured more. "I love using this stuff."

"I didn't want more."

"Well, there you have it anyway." Tritt leaned forward. "Have you ever considered treason, Captain?"

Peavey laughed. "Never, sir. Never."

"Not at all?" Tritt had a big smile on his face like it was all a great joke between friends.

"Not at all."

"Not even against the popinjay? Come on. What would you like to do to that one?"

Peavey shrugged and stuck his hands out to either side. "I can't say I wouldn't enjoy seeing him get his, but no, I would never let him lower me to that level. I will serve out as I can, as long as my family is safe and my duty is done and my orders are clear and the sun still shines and that stuff. That … emperor. Whatever. You know?"

"You sound like a good man, Peavey."

"I hope so."

"Are you? A good man?"

"Yeah. Yes. I think so?"

Tritt nodded, looking pleased. "I don't run into those very often." Opan smiled. "Are you sure you haven't done anything I need to know about? Do you twist your orders a little sometimes? Lifted a few things from stores? Abused your privileges?"

"No! 'Course not." But then he immediately blurted out, "I cheat on my shift hours sometimes. No one catches me at it. 'Specially since I'm captain. And I've slept in the ready room before. That's nice." Peavey nodded to himself, thinking about his delinquencies.

They were so trivial. Tritt's expression warmed further. "Well then, I think I'm done here. You need a walk back to your quarters?"

"I don't know. I feel so loose. It's nice. You're nice. Everyone's nice. I might even like the boy. It's strange. I'm not normally like this when I drink." Tritt got an arm around his waist and helped him up. "You know," Peavey continued, "I have never promoted any of my children. I never asked. Let them themselves, you know? And then to have my superior officer? Just because of his father, who should have been removed years ago? And just as bad? Is neog … napa … nepot … nepotism. There. Yes."

"Uh-huh. Keep walking." Tritt maneuvered them down the hallway. The lift wasn't far, which was on purpose.

"It's a shame. We should all be ashmd. Shemed. Shemming. Um, hm, why can't I talk?"

"Seem to be doing fine to me," Tritt said. "I need to get you off the subject now, so let's try singing."

By the time Tritt dropped Peavey off with his wife, the captain was happily belting out old drinking songs. In the morning, he'd remember little and Tritt would claim he'd downed half the bottle before he cut him off. Also in the morning, Tritt would listen to the recording he'd made of the conversation and provide his report to General Hux, as ordered. Then he'd be on to the next of a long list of people Hux wanted investigated. But this one, at least, was fine.


	20. Audit Reporting

**A/N: Summa-verminoth are the vacu-breathers from the movie Solo which inhabit the Akkadese Maelstrom outside of Kessel.**

 **For those watching the march of time through these chapters, Hux's first meeting with Snoke occurred a little more than five and a half years before TFA/TLJ (more like five years and 9ish months). The Starkiller Base project had its official kickoff about six months after that first meeting, so around five years before TFA/TLJ. The chapter 'Promotion' mentions that the Starkiller project is half done – two and a half years have passed. 'Promotion' is set about two and a half years before TFA/TLJ.**

 **The** _ **Supremacy**_ **was a four year project while Starkiller was a five year project, both starting at the same time. Thus, the** _ **Supremacy**_ **has a year and a half to go until 'done'. Note that by this point in time, Hux has probably heard Kylo Ren's name in passing, but they haven't been introduced and frankly, the Knights of Ren haven't been all that important to Hux's life. That will change soon.**

 **Warning: Oblique reference to cutting and self-harm.**

* * *

Alone, Hux walked to the forward viewport on the ship that would eventually be called the _Supremacy_. People called it that already, just as they called his project Starkiller Base even though it was still a construction site. They had to call it something. 'The weapon' or 'the mega-cruiser' was too vague even though there was only one of each.

Outside he could see the shipyards that Kuat Entralla had built decades ago at the order of Emperor Palpatine, whose foresight, guided by the Force, had told him this would be necessary for the fulfillment of his goals. Or maybe he was just seeing what was going to happen, even if it had nothing to do with his goals. Hux didn't know. Neither had Thrawn, although the two of them had speculated endlessly about it, not too many years ago. He missed Thrawn. Instead, Snoke was here. Hux moved his thoughts along to focusing on what he could see.

At the moment, they had only two ships docked for repairs – one for engine failure and one for hull damage, both having occurred during a spat with a summa-verminoth in the Kessel sector. These were a pair of Imperial destroyers. Hux had to hope the Resurgent-class ships would fare better against the beasts, because they needed the coaxium from Kessel. At least these ships had been able to limp back with minimal casualties and full cargo holds, so there was that.

He was learning a thing or two about ship fabrication, despite how nerve-wracking the day had been. He'd never inspected a ship under construction and hardly knew what to look for. The _Supremacy_ was progressing well as far as he could tell. The superstructure was complete. The hull was sealed. The containment fields were in synchronous operation. From the outside, it might look complete, but it was a massive empty shell inside.

At this point, the atmosphere was intentionally thin through most of the ship, containing only enough oxygen to prevent immediate death. More was being added every day. The few partial decks that had been dressed out were pressurized with a regular atmosphere. Gravity was stable. Things were basically where they were supposed to be according to the schedule. She should be ready for her maiden flight in a year, although internal construction of critical, closed-circuit life support systems would be ongoing for some months thereafter.

Director Drewmill resented his presence as well as the fact that Snoke had sent him to audit her project instead of showing up himself. She made it clear she didn't like reporting to Hux, even if he was a general now. Which one of them was higher ranked, when standing in the middle of her project, was arguable, and they had, of course, argued. Snoke trumped both of them and he said Hux would do the inspection, so that was that. But the hardest thing for Hux to deal with was Snoke's presence in his mind.

It was a constant pressure. Hux had divined that Snoke could not physically possess him. Maybe it was the distance or some other reason, but if he could have done it, Hux was fairly sure he would have. Instead, he gave directions, mentally projecting his wishes into Hux's mind as complex ideas, dictated questions verbatim to him in the times when Hux couldn't figure out what he meant, and frequently upbraided him for being stupid when Hux knew perfectly well that he was brilliant by human standards and this just happened to be an area he was relatively ignorant of. It was exhausting.

He never told Drewmill what was going on. He didn't want her to know. It wasn't her business. Snoke didn't suggest he tell her. It left him acting distracted and disjointed at moments, then snappish when she had little patience for his lapses.

For now, Snoke's attention had gone elsewhere without explanation, allowing Hux some time to himself. His brain felt bruised. He didn't know how else to describe it. He wanted to be alone, but he suspected he would never truly be alone again. Staring out the viewport like this was the best he could manage. It got him away from the other people, at least. He couldn't get away from Snoke, who might return at any time or not at all.

Hux stared out at the cold, distant stars. They had calmed him in the past. They helped now. They were out there, far away. Destinations. Other worlds where other lives happened. Lives different from his own present one. He was desperately unhappy with his life. He swallowed and blinked, taking several deep, shaky breaths as he tried to steady himself. It would not do to have Snoke find him like this, on the verge of a breakdown due to no more than considering his present state.

He recalled going to his father with an injury, a cut over his wrist that he worried was deep enough to threaten the tendons. His father's response: "Good! It will make you stronger." To his worry about losing his hand (which was a child's worry, Hux knew now he might have been in danger only of losing functionality, but not the whole hand): "Then maybe you'll think twice about letting someone cut you!" To his objection that he hadn't allowed the cut, his father had laughed: "Yes, you did. No one hurts you without your permission. You need to develop a taste for blood. Hurt them back. Then they won't touch you."

His father's words stuck firmly in his memory. Whatever Armitage might have said in response was vague and unimportant.

He'd started licking his blood around that time. He had an equally childish idea that it might make him less effected by getting the blood of others on himself if he could 'develop a taste' for it. It had not. The blood of others (and their bodily fluids) continued to disgust him. But the taste of his own blood had become a twisted self-soothing method. The monomolecular blade had many uses.

'No one hurts you without your permission.' He supposed he had granted that permission to Snoke by not fighting him to the death. There had never been a reason to fight him, from Hux's point of view. (Brendol's extensive conditioning meant Hux did not see his own health and mental integrity as a valid reason to resist lawful authority.) Snoke was the accepted leader of the First Order. That meant … permission was ongoing … unless, somehow, Snoke's leadership wasn't accepted.

Even with his nose stuck firmly to the grindstone of his project, Hux had heard rumblings of such treason. He'd heard of the Knights of Ren visiting people for welfare checks and of high ranked persons being removed without notice. As Snoke had promised, he would crush the conspiracy one individual at a time. Hux was now emulating that, though it hadn't been his initial intention with Opan – but he could see, it was the same pattern.

Hux was not a traitor, nor a coward. He would not join forces with those who were. Until such time Snoke was no longer leader, he would follow his orders and his example. As such, he shepherded his thoughts away from the troublesome subject and refocused on his mission, straightening to attention as he did.

The goal of the First Order was to restore order, rule of law, and thereby peace and prosperity to the galaxy. They would provide a home and a purpose for the lost children of the New Republic – outcasts that not even slave traders valued too highly, refugees from war and desolation, from the environmental collapse on two score of worlds forgotten or abandoned by the New Republic as insignificant.

This ship was key to doing that. Starkiller was another key. It seemed that Snoke, too, was a critical component, because without him there would have been neither. Their day of victory was coming, when the First Order would establish a new regime, a new government, and the emperor's Contingency Plan – the last valid orders of the Old Republic - would finally be fulfilled. Any sacrifice was appropriate if it brought them success – his dignity, his autonomy, his sanity, his being.

Hux set aside his unhappiness. It was a selfish, egocentric distraction that he couldn't afford when the refugees from Lebeka were only now attending their first classes, when the purchased slave-spawn from Tatooine were still getting their basic education, when the survivors of Geonosis were only now becoming subadults, when the last children they'd bought from Jakku were a year from graduation. These people, and more, needed him. They needed a galaxy they could live in as citizens and not as slaves, either as slaves to the war effort or literal ones to their previous masters. The only way to avoid that was to win.

One last thought from his father: "Discipline yourself and I won't need to." Back straight, head up, Hux turned and walked over to Director Drewmill. He had a few questions of his own to ask to make sure this ship was what the Order truly needed.


	21. Break Time

**A/N: By the end of this, Hux has just about had enough of Snoke and the fucking Force.**

* * *

"Three days, sir." That was how much the schedule had slipped, an event which had caused Snoke to call him to his audience chamber on the _Eclipse_.

"Any excuses you wish to tender?" Snoke sounded bored, like this was expected and routine. Perhaps to him, disposing of unsatisfactory underlings _was_ routine. Or maybe just disciplining him.

"No," Hux said crisply. He was resigned to whatever might happen. He didn't know what he could have done better, nor did he have ideas at the moment as to how to improve. If he were allowed the opportunity, he would certainly try new things. Maybe Drewmill could help him with ideas. She might relish the opportunity to tell him where he'd gone wrong. Or even Boxbea, who would be friendlier, and had extensive experience in project management. "It was my responsibility to keep the project moving as it should. I failed."

"So you did."

With that, he was flung against the wall by that infernal power Snoke wielded so easily. It felt like he was lacerated, like his skin was split and peeled off of him. Hux looked urgently to either side of his outstretched arms, expecting to see shredded clothing and spattering blood – but there was nothing. The pain was another illusion, he realized. A mind trick. All in his head.

"Is it?" Snoke asked, and shuffled a few steps closer, leaning forward inquisitively like Hux was finally doing something interesting.

The pain did not stop. It spread, seeping along his limbs like acid, lighting him up in the worst possible way inside. He could hardly breathe. His hands writhed, trying to throw off the sensation. The rest of him squirmed, trying to get away but there was no escape. He couldn't even touch the floor. He was stuck to the wall as though affixed by his lower back. The rest of his limbs were no longer restrained, but there was nothing he could do with them. He balled his fists and tried to still himself to keep some level of composure.

"Make it stop, then," Snoke invited him mockingly. "Show me that you are the master of what you feel, of what you are. Focus your will and _end_ this exercise of mine!" Snoke gave a sinister laugh.

Hux could barely think, but he refused to give in. He refused to let go and dissociate from the pain like he always had before. He stayed in it, believing with every fiber of his soul that this torment was fake and he could beat Snoke on this. He would not be taken in. He would not be tortured by his own mind. His being, his thinking, it belonged to _him_ and not to Snoke. Not to anyone but himself.

It didn't make a whit of difference.

Snoke chuckled off-handedly. "I thought not. It would be a difficult feat even for an adept, which you are not. You are blind. Almost willfully so, though I must confess that suits my purpose." Through this dialogue, the assault on Hux's senses did not relent. Hux paid little attention to the words. He only knew he was being disrespected, again, for failing at something he had no idea how to do, or even if it could be done.

He grit his teeth, clenched everything he had, and tried again to expel the fictitious agony. He had the determination. He had the willpower. He had the desire. He tried with brute force until his heart thundered in his chest and his lungs burned. He flushed. He sweated. He ached. But it was still there. Everywhere. Every nerve ending. Every part of his brain. Pain. He was frying. Sizzling. Dying.

He gave up. But then … Snoke did not release him. When Hux realized the torment wasn't ending along the time scale he was used to, what he had subconsciously expected, he panicked and broke. With his voice shaking in a disgusting display of fear, he babbled, "What do you want then? I will give it to you! Anything! I'll cooperate. I'll submit. Whatever, whatever …"

He struggled against the force holding him, desperate now and uncoordinated. It was just as useless – fear was no better at breaking him free than anger and hope. He was at Snoke's mercy, which he knew there was none of. Scenes flashed through his head – others Snoke had killed, or hurt, or times when Snoke had hurt Hux with such callous disregard that Hux knew there was no way to placate him. He knew why Pabril had reached for his blaster at the end, although Hux had no intention of doing so. No, wait, he might be able to use it on himself … He remembered how much he'd despised Halcor for the same. It stopped that line of thinking in its tracks.

Every man had a breaking point. Brendol had drilled that into his son. It had been reinforced by others – Tritt Opan, an imperial interrogator who would know, and those whom Brendol or Tritt had tortured to death before him as a part of Armitage's education. He'd ended up feeling sorry for those people, angry at them for letting it come to this. He wasn't angry at them for groveling or pleading at the end because his father had told him that was the natural state. So when he felt himself break down in front of Snoke, it wasn't himself that he blamed. He already knew he was weak inside.

He hated Snoke even more at that moment – a deep, pure, revulsion that the creature wanted this sort of abasement from him, had pushed him to the point of considering, even for a moment, such dishonorable escapes. If Snoke did not want him to be a sniveling coward cringing before him, then he shouldn't be treating him this way. It was Snoke's fault; not Hux's. Snoke grimaced, lips pressing together in distaste and disappointment. Hux was dropped to the floor.

He shuddered uncontrollably, his brain still running circles in the mode of abject servility. "Whatever you want, I will-"

"No, you will not," Snoke snapped at him irritably. "You have already given me everything you are capable of. Haven't you? Or have you been holding back?"

"No!" Hux yelped. "Everything." He felt Snoke rip through his mind with the usual careless disregard for his victim's side of the experience, then withdraw his presence from Hux's head with the same indifference.

"If you had more to offer, then I would take it. But you do not, because you are pathetic." Snoke started to walk away. "Barely worth using and not while you're like this." He sounded disgusted.

"Yes sir."

Snoke turned back fast enough that Hux flinched and crouched lower, eyes wide. He had no idea what he'd just done or said that was wrong … or thought (he scrambled back through his thoughts but there had been nothing offensive in them as far as Hux knew). Snoke rolled his eyes, an affectation he'd picked up in the last few years, and headed off once more to his seat.

Hux was left kneeling on the floor. His hands were shaking. He balled them into fists again, feeling his nails cut into his palms. His breathing was uneven and his chest felt like there was a huge knot inside, like he wanted to be sobbing but his body had forgotten how to do it. All for the best, he thought. Crying was for babies. It was beneath him, he hoped.

He put his hair back in some semblance of order. He was glad he'd emptied his bladder immediately before this audience. It had been prudent. He hoped the medications he'd taken would address the expected nausea and other issues. If he had not survived, then it wouldn't have mattered, but on the chance he would, he'd wanted to be prepared. He reviewed these things in his mind, trying to reassure himself that he'd done the best he could.

He wasn't sure what he was supposed to do next. Rise? Stay? Leave? Wait for instructions? Snoke wasn't looking at him, but seemed still conscious and present. That was dangerous. He doubted Snoke had obtained the emotional release he needed to dissipate his wrath. Maybe this was a test? If so, Hux could prove himself by properly anticipating what Snoke wanted. Which he had little idea of.

Or did he?

Snoke wanted performance out of him. He always had, from the start. Pushing Hux past his breaking point had resulted in Snoke dropping him and retreating. It was tempting to think he'd been dropped because the begging worked, but that didn't fit with the rest of his experience of Snoke. It was the 'sir' that had caused the creature to spin back, Hux guessed. Perhaps he'd thought it was mocking. When he'd realized it was not … there was no punishment.

These things Hux strung together in his mind as he attempted to find logic in his world, to impose rationality to it, to learn to predict it, and thereby, gain some measure of control. He did not like being reduced to this state – his body in rebellion, his thoughts scattered, his emotions disordered. It made it difficult to work. If he couldn't work, then he couldn't accomplish his mission. Also, as a side note, he would be useless to Snoke and that truly would be the end of him.

He swallowed down the retch he wanted to make, then got to his feet. He forced his legs to cooperate and stiffened his spine. He couldn't stop his hands from shaking, so crossed them behind himself and held one wrist tightly with the opposite hand. He took a few centering breaths and moved forward properly with decent posture. "Will there be anything else, Leader Snoke?" His voice trembled so much the words slurred, but it was the best he could manage at the moment.

Snoke sounded annoyed, which confirmed for Hux that Snoke had not received what he needed. "The lesson I was attempting to instill in you is not the one you have taken from this. The Force is not a thing you can wish away. It is not an illusion. So long as you think of it as such, you will never appreciate its power. It is the galaxy, this coarse existence – which is the only one you know – that is the farce." Snoke gave him a long, penetrating look.

Hux licked his lips nervously. He wasn't sure what to do with this information, but clearly Snoke was waiting for his response. "Your power is not an illusion." Snoke kept looking at him, so Hux went on, "None of your powers are illusions or mind tricks. They all … happen. In the real world. They are not lies – not like the lies of the Jedi."

Snoke stared at him a bit more, but ultimately, he seemed mollified by the favorable comparison to the perfidious Jedi. "That is a sufficient understanding of it. To answer your question – rectify the schedule. If I find your efforts to be insufficient, then I will come to the planet myself to investigate the reasons for your continued failure."

"Yes Leader Snoke." He didn't use 'sir'. He also didn't blurt out that he had no idea why things hadn't gone off perfectly except that it was too much to expect them to go off perfectly. His team was tired. Hux was tired. They had been more than three years on this. Everything was a constant state of panic and high priority.

Although no one who worked directly for him had complained, he was getting a reputation as a slave driver. The personnel office had issued him repeated, pointed 'suggestions' that he take leadership training courses and discourage the very double shifts that had gotten them this far, this fast. He didn't have time for that. He felt like he didn't have time for anything anymore. Aside from work and what little sleep he was able to get, he didn't do anything. Maybe that was the problem?

Hux turned and headed out, trying to feel something about the idea that Snoke might personally involve himself in Starkiller – panic, urgency, fear even. He just felt numb. Depressed. He needed to go somewhere quiet and dark and let himself recover. Then … he would pull his thoughts together and it would be back to work.


	22. Project Management

**A/N: This was backstory for some scenes that never made it into Happily Ever After. This is also the rediscovery of hyperspace tracking, which was shown in TLJ and mentioned when Jyn Erso was reading through file headers on Scarif in Rogue One.**

* * *

Hux stood with lips pursed and fists on hips, watching as the huge construction droids deployed as they were supposed to. In this particular area, they were beginning the stage of secondary clean-up – moving stone that had been missed by the main excavators and finishing out the shaping as needed for the conduits that would be placed later.

Further down the immense chamber, primary excavation toiled busily. That area was not environmentally friendly for humans – due to sound, mainly, but also suspended particulate matter and the high temperatures as they dug into the mantel of the planet. He monitored the primary stage by remote surveillance when he needed to. But here – here he could look at in person.

Witnessing it in person was something Hux _felt_ was necessary, although he couldn't explain why that was. Things simply seemed to work better when he did. 'A watched pot never boils' was the old saying, although in this case it was more like 'a closely monitored project doesn't fuck up.' So here he was.

With a heavy exhalation, he turned and stalked back to his office. It was more like a shuttle than what most would think of as an office. Starkiller Base was immense. With the near-exponential growth rate of the self-replicating construction droids, it would soon span the entire planetary interior. After that, the interesting engineering stuff would happen. For years now, the main measurable progress had been simple digging.

Rather than move his information, displays, work centers, and resting area on Starkiller from place to place, he had elected to move the entire office. Once the main access tunnels had been drilled to the primary subsurface area, this had been a feasible solution. Before then – well, he'd found a new interest in long-distance running when he wasn't being ferried around. Running from place to place wasn't very dignified, but until recently there hadn't been many people to witness it. The population had expanded rapidly of late and now he only ran as part of his necessary self-maintenance exercise.

Back inside the sealed ship, he turned on the main wall display, changing it from the night sky of Lanson Down to a graph that tracked the various milestones and deadlines associated with the project. He pored over them meticulously. He'd been punished within an inch of his sanity for being late and they were _still_ late.

He went over each area one at a time. His main function had long since ceased to be coming up with ideas or actually finding solutions, and instead turned to managing others who did the grunt work of making things happen. The mechanical engineers – Cheskar's team - were the current bottleneck, working their hardest to transfer prototype designs to planetary scale. It wasn't as easy as just drawing things bigger, as Hux well knew. The Droiders (the excavation team) were actually ahead of schedule, but it didn't matter much if the rest couldn't keep up.

He looked at the productivity indicators for the various project leaders and considered, again, Snoke's reaction were they to continue to lag. He knew he could push them harder. That would increase the possibility of mistakes. Most of them were already working insane hours, voluntarily, because they knew what would happen if they didn't. Those who hadn't seen torture or death before their eyes had heard about it. Everyone was motivated. He sighed. He had to find a balance that he could stand behind, that he was willing to die for, because that was what it came down to.

If there were no further delays, then they should make the next set of deadlines. Anywhere he could save time would help, though. He clenched his hands into fists where he'd joined them behind his back. He didn't see anywhere that his personal attention and emphasis would improve things. He could easily interfere and make things more difficult. Stressing his people was counterproductive, he reminded himself. He would save that for genuine emergencies. The _possibility_ of Snoke's ire (and the consequences of such) did not constitute an emergency. He exhaled heavily again.

It didn't matter whether Leader Snoke agreed with his management style. Ironically, this was precisely because Leader Snoke was a telepath who routinely used that power to abuse and violate his subordinates. If he knew (or could know) for an absolute fact that Hux had done his best in every way, then Hux's best in every way was an armor against anything Snoke might sling at him.

He had passed the stage where Snoke's mockery of his weaknesses stung him. Broken, Hux had accepted his failings as features. Snoke could accept them, change them, or rid himself of Armitage. If Hux was already doing his best, then it didn't matter to him what Snoke decided to do. He had reached a stage of dangerous resignation.

It wasn't even Snoke that mattered to Hux. The larger issue was the First Order itself. Hux never lost sight of why he endured his superior officer. He knew, more than any other, what the goal of the Order was and how Starkiller Base furthered that mission. Completing this project to Snoke's desires advanced the Order as a whole. Hux and Snoke were in accord in this manner – while Hux could only guess at Snoke's deeper motivations, advancing the Order advanced Snoke. That was why Hux obeyed.

He turned off the screen and stared briefly, soberly, at the starfield that replaced it automatically. If there was no directly-related Starkiller work to be done, then what was the best use of his time? Internally, he reviewed his next meal time (an hour away), his need for rest (not particularly), his need for exercise (regularly scheduled, not until next shift). He'd already reviewed Phasma's report on the cadet's training at the start of shift. He'd skimmed the captain's logs for the three star destroyers on permanent picket duty around the planet. He'd read Opan's latest report on internal security and Birnham's on morale.

He reached out and turned on the screen again with a slow, deliberate movement. This time, then, he would use as his own. He'd been overstressed. It was counterproductive. He strayed from what Snoke had assigned him.

Hux settled into a chair and pulled up a database he'd been picking his way through for years now. It was one of those pet interests that annoyed Snoke to no end with him, and whose disparaging statements about which Hux largely ignored. If he had, in fact and in good conscience, fulfilled his duty in regard to Snoke's commands and the normal scope of his work, then he felt himself free to pursue his interests. They were, after all, the reason for the Starkiller project. And Hux had a long history of being selective about his orders when they seemed counterproductive to the overall mission. This was what he told himself.

He'd done it in seeking out training and educational programs his father had dismissed. Now he did it by ignoring Snoke's belittling of his hobbies. This hobby he had from Thrawn, a creature of deep strategic thought, intelligence, and admirable wiles. Thrawn had given Armitage a copy of the Tarkin Initiative database.

It wasn't supposed to exist at all. Hux didn't know exactly how Thrawn had come into possession of it, but it contained much of the collected research of the later-stage Empire, research directions informed by Palpatine's understanding of the Force. It was amazing what could be developed when one already knew what was possible and not, via supernatural means. That the very emblem of the Tarkin Initiative was a kyber crystal was not lost on Hux.

Hux himself detested the means, but he had to give credit to what it had yielded. But then Scarif had been destroyed, followed by the Death Star, followed by the emperor, followed by the Empire. No one had continued their research. Salaries were gone, facilities in tatters, Palpatine dead, chain of command shattered. There had been no mission, no leader. From the ashes, the First Order had risen to finish what the Empire had been made to do – to bring order, prosperity, and justice.

And so now, Armitage Hux used his free time to scour their collected research archives to see what could be salvaged to advance that mission. He scrolled over to the section on hyperspace. He liked that area. He had from the start. That and the Jedi stuff, precious little there was on them. He'd long since exhausted what there was about kyber crystals, holocrons, and related things. Then he'd moved on to hyperspace. It was like a space outside of space – a place that could take him anywhere he wanted to go. Such as … away.

He sighed, swallowed, and slumped in his seat, eyes moving steadily over the text on the screen where it described the attenuated trails left by objects that passed through hyperspace. The document described it as a shadow, but it seemed to Hux more like a sliver of light. He wondered if it would be possible to track ships using these thin slivers. It seemed to be what the original researcher had been aiming at.


	23. Lateral Transfer

Snoke's command shuttle looked like any other. Hux watched it with disinterest as it shimmered through the containment field of the immense main hangar of Starkiller Base. The schedule was still two days behind. As promised, Snoke was here to address the issue personally.

Two guards in red came down the ramp first. Hux felt a whisper in his mind that he assumed to be Snoke. It either left or became undetectable as soon as he noticed it. Six staff members exited next, which was non-standard. They formed up to the left of the end of the ramp. Then Snoke, finally, who should have been the first down after the guards. Behind him was a Knight of Ren, one of the taller ones.

Hux thought he should have been trembling in fear at this point. Snoke's purpose here was not good for anyone. Just about everyone with a name on the base knew this. People with mere designations – letters and numbers – were probably oblivious, and rightly so. Hux had tried to keep it that way, insulating the common workers from the emotional stress. He should have been feeling stressed himself, but he didn't.

He felt … happy. Content. He'd done his best and if this was the end, then he was frankly looking forward to it. The very faint smile that crossed his face as Snoke stepped off the ramp was real. Snoke had had to come here in person. Hux supposed there was a vindictive little victory in inconveniencing the creature who was going to kill him. He shouldn't find it funny, but he did. He was beginning to think he should have taken Opan's suggestion and downed a sedative, because he felt inclined to laugh challengingly in the monster's face just to get it over with.

Hux strode forward sharply, his boot heels ringing out on the duracrete surface. "Leader Snoke," he said warmly.

Snoke raised a brow at him. There was a pause and that whisper in his mind once more.

 _I am your instrument as always,_ Hux thought firmly. _Thank you for coming._ And he was genuine about it. He really was. Maybe this could be settled. At the very least, the tension was over. He could finally relax.

The Knight of Ren moved forward, subtly edging between them as though Hux posed a threat. Hux met the gaze of the opaque visor, then returned his attention to his leader.

"As you have surmised, General," Snoke told him, "your usefulness here draws to a close. My staff and myself will administer this project until such time as it is returned to schedule. To start, you will provide a tour and orientation to facilitate the handoff."

"Of course, Leader Snoke." Hux didn't bother speculating about what would happen after the tour. He didn't care. Instead, he turned to the six who had come with Snoke. They were introduced, as was the knight – Kylo Ren, Master of the Knights of Ren. Hux gave the tour as instructed, with Snoke and the knight not bothering to accompany him in person. Hux felt Snoke's presence intermittently in his head, but Snoke had little to say.

It took most of the day. Hux's mood stayed high throughout. He was cheery and open about the challenges they'd encountered in the project. They were still looking to complete their trio of kyber crystals for the main firing mechanism. They'd found four, but they needed to find any three that were compatible. Installing compatible crystals would be the last piece of engineering, so they had most of two years to achieve this. Still, it was the riskiest part of the entire operation (risky in that if they couldn't find compatible crystals, the entire project failed), so Hux would not feel 'done' until they had that part locked down. He felt sorry he might not be around for that, but did his best to leave the matter in good hands.

At the conclusion of the day, he had dinner privately with Snoke, aboard the command shuttle.

"Your conduct today has been admirable," Snoke said, beginning his meal with a soup he took in through a straw.

Hux had a standard meal tray that had been brought from the base's cafeteria. It was cold. Not wanting his last meal to be unpleasant (or vomited up should his manner of death be anything other than quick), he toyed with it without eating. "Thank you, Leader Snoke." He had been taking care not to address him as 'sir', although he didn't know if that mattered. Others called Snoke 'sir' and it didn't get a rise out of him.

"However," Snoke continued, "your performance in managing this project has degraded. You have condoned luxuries and indolence. You tolerate frivolous expenditures of time among your subordinates and have begun to engage in the same yourself. You have lost the will to correct these problems. Were I to leave this to your continued mismanagement, the First Order will fail."

Hux stiffened. His lips pressed together. He did not want the Order to suffer. He wanted to argue about how the pace was inhuman and a little free time was not going to destroy the entire Order. But he said nothing.

"Yes, it _will_ ," Snoke said, as though he had spoken all his concerns aloud. Snoke's piercing blue eyes were actually patient for once. Hux met them. As much as he was able, he let down his mental defenses in an attempt to convey (if Snoke truly was reading his mind that deeply) that the pressures they'd all been under were deteriorating performance across the board.

It was like Brendol had shown him – one stroke of the lash earned an immediate response from an animal; so did two, but not as much; a third helped again, but decreasingly; somewhere after five or six, additional blows were counterproductive. A tremor-ox would pull no harder and would in fact begin to falter and give up if beaten too hard and too often.

Snoke took a long, slow draw of his soup without ever breaking eye contact. He swallowed. "That is why I am transferring your assignment to the _Finalizer_ , where you will assist Kylo Ren in pursuit of my other project. A shift in leadership here will accomplish more than any increase in punishment from you, or to you."

"I am … to be transferred? Not killed?"

"Not killed." Snoke took another draw of soup, favoring the more intact right side of his face. "You may eat."

"Oh." Hux looked at his food, deciding that yes, he might as well.

Snoke watched for a moment. "As soon as our enemies discover Starkiller Base, they will bend all their powers to destroying or disabling it. If it is incomplete at that time, then it will be lost to us without advancing our cause. To have wasted so many resources without recompense will be a blow the Order will not recover from."

Hux nodded agreeably. He felt unsettled to discover he wasn't going to be executed tonight. He'd … been looking forward to having it all be over. He didn't know what to think about the responsibility involved in his life continuing, so he went along.

"To that end," Snoke said, "it is vital we not be discovered. However, there are other priorities that must be managed, risks we have no choice but to undertake. You will assist with these."

"'Assist'?" It was the second time Snoke had used that word. Not that he was supposed to accomplish something, but just that he would 'assist' with it.

"Do you know the highest priority for the First Order?"

That was an odd question. He assumed it was rhetorical. He gave the standard answer every schoolchild knew. "To restore order in the galaxy."

"No." Snoke frowned at him, put-out. "There are three projects critical to the survival and success of the First Order. One is this planet – the weapon. The second is the _Supremacy_ , which you have seen yourself. One day, that ship will be the unification of the galaxy. But the third, I have been working on myself, personally, because it is the key to all the rest. It cannot be allowed to go astray." Snoke's voice was low and slow, a seductive drawl that made Hux's skin crawl. "Think. Show me the brilliance you believe you possess."

Hux barely suppressed a huff of exasperation that he was supposed to answer a kriffing riddle. But now that the challenge had been made … He had originally thought the third priority project was espionage, or maybe this certainty about the future that Snoke used to set the course for the other projects. Was that really something he was working on? All the time, or a lot of it? Did receiving a Force vision really take all that long when the creation of a hyperspace wormhole had been the work of an evening? What was it Snoke spent most of his time on, if not that?

Learning. Listening. Reading people's minds. Ferreting out dissent. Optimizing the organization. So was it building loyalty? That would be similar to Brendol's goal – sharpening the knife, so to speak. No matter how sharp the blade, there were three things needed additional: opportunity, skill, and intent. The _Supremacy_ and Starkiller gave them the opportunity and ability to destroy their enemies. It must be the intent that Snoke was working on. If he came here to Starkiller and used some mass Force power of persuasion, would the project get back on track? Was that the 'intent' he was working on with the Order as a whole? It didn't feel right.

Snoke finished his soup and tilted his head slightly. "That is a correct answer for the wrong question. My efforts to conceal my work have been successful." He had a smug expression.

Hux took a bite of his protein patty, thinking Snoke's self-congratulatory attitude was inappropriate. Hux was duty-bound (and had been specifically told) not to inquire too closely of his leader's activities. It was like applauding yourself for a blind person not noticing your sleight of hand.

 _I should harm you for such a thought, but you would choke on your food and die._

Hux paused with his fork most of the way to his mouth, then let it traverse the rest of the way. Snoke wouldn't be warning him if he intended to do it. _I am as respectful as I can be. You know this. You have asked me to not pay attention to something and then chide me for having done as directed? I am not capable of both, nor will I pander to your ego in the privacy of my own thoughts!_

Now _that_ was disrespectful. The petty officer who had stayed in the shuttle knew nothing of this. Having experienced Snoke's ability to control senses, Hux doubted she could hear even the spoken words between them. She slid Snoke's next course of food in front of him and took away the soup bowl. Snoke ignored her in favor of staring at Hux.

"Your thoughts are not private. They belong to me." Snoke's voice was a hiss, but it was more amused than angry. Hux had a good ear for the difference.

"Then think them for me," he suggested seriously, staring at Snoke right back. Hux had had enough and finding out he wasn't going to be killed today was downright disappointing. "I allow that. You know this, too. I will follow whatever orders you give me. But _**I**_ am the one making the decision to submit and obey. Not you."

Snoke looked down to pick up his fork as though Hux had not practically thrown down a gauntlet. He began to eat his noodles, calm as could be. These were noodles, in fact, and not worms as Hux had feared when he'd seen something similar on the creature's plate some time back. Hux exhaled slowly and moved on with his own meal. He was amazed he was still alive. But the night was still young.

"Tomorrow," Snoke said, "you will use this shuttle to report to the _Finalizer,_ accompanied by Kylo Ren. He will be your co-commander in all functional capacity. If there is some bureaucratic nonsense that needs attending to for this to be accomplished, you will see to it."

"Co-commander?" The word had no meaning. Hux understood by inference and etymology what Snoke was getting at, but that wasn't a real word, much less a rank. "What is our mission?" Perhaps that would clarify it.

"Overall? Your mission is the answer to the riddle. Kylo will know specifics, but I do not believe he knows any more than you do."

"You set me up for failure if I do not have critical information."

"I set Kylo Ren up for failure if I give you too much." Snoke waved a hand dismissively. "You would threaten him, he would destroy you, the First Order would fail, I would die. This is not a future I will allow. So. Get the information from Kylo Ren. In the morning."


	24. Exit Interview

**A/N:** From the Happily Ever After chapter, 'Lounging':

Poe asked, _Have you ever had anyone make a pass at you? One that you did notice?_

 _Yes._

 _Tell me?_

 _On Starkiller. During construction. Two of the technicians. I declined._

 _Why?_

 _I was uninterested. They wanted to have sex. I did not wish to. It never went further than that. There was no … emotional intimacy, as there is with you. No one has ever offered to be close to me as you have._

* * *

"You're al-, uh, is everything alright?" Cheskar sounded hopeful.

"Yes, it is," Hux told them. "I'm being transferred in the morning. That gives me a chance to collect my things and say my good-byes, although I suspect I will be back at some point."

Cheskar nodded, a smile forming. "But you're going to be okay? That's more than you were expecting this morning!"

Hux smiled back fondly, touched by their concern. "Yes, it is."

"I didn't say it this morning, but I will now – he would be an absolute idiot to get rid of you. You are the most devoted and dutiful person I've ever met. You're the one who's held this project together for years now, always pushing, but never too hard. I don't know what we're going to do without you."

"Try not to get yourself killed. Snoke has no tolerance on certain subjects – lack of effort and lack of loyalty chief among them. I think it may be that our leader is wiser than I knew in that he too has recognized that I have become burned out here. It's time for a change of scenery."

"We'll miss you."

"As I said, it's probably not permanent." Hux turned to go.

"Hey."

He turned back expectantly.

"You're alive. I'm not going to see you for a while. You're not my commanding officer anymore. You want to celebrate before you go?"

Technically, he was still in command here until morning, but that wasn't what Cheskar was getting at. Something else was afoot. "What do you mean?"

"Do you want to get laid?"

Hux blinked at them, mouth suddenly dry. "What?"

"Do you want to fuck? I've talked to Lanlisa about it in the past. If you're not into me, she's interested. Or the three of us if you just want to feel it out."

"Three?"

Cheskar smiled and blushed a little. "We're not a bunch of unsexed slaves, General. We've been trapped on this base even more than you have. Some of us fight burnout different ways."

"Oh." He'd never known. Or paid attention, since what happened in people's bunks didn't concern him.

Cheskar blushed harder. "Is that a yes or a no?"

It wasn't a terrible idea, as he thought about it. Sex was supposedly exciting and good with a friendly, willing partner, although Hux didn't really want to have it despite the positive reputation of the act. He doubted he could perform. He doubted even more that he'd be able to tolerate their hands on him … or their mouths … or any of the other things he understood to come with sex. So maybe it was a terrible idea after all.

The more important thing was that although he was friendly with Cheskar, and that was obviously mutual, there was nothing in Cheskar's comportment that made Hux think there was any interest in who he was as a person. They apparently fucked their subordinates (a dicey situation, unethical and unwise) and did it as stress relief. Maybe just to alleviate boredom. Cheskar wanted to get off and involve Hux in that. Hux didn't want to be involved.

"I'm … I'm afraid … that would be a no. I would have to decline your kind offer. Thank you for making it."

"No problem. Need any help with anything tonight?"

"No. No, I'm fine. Thank you." Hux made his retreat as gracefully as possible.


	25. Communication Protocols

**A/N: There is a planet in Star Wars called Iego. It's in the Outer Rim with a very low population. Mostly hostile to human life and no longer producing anything economically viable. The First Order has made recruitment runs by it. Captain Iegoh joined the First Order as an adult and took a slightly altered version of the name of his homeworld as his last name. Not that this really matters, but hey – even my throwaway background characters have backstories!**

 **There are two chapters in Knights of Ren that relate the day of events from Kylo's point of view. Like so many things in Kylo's life, it did not go the way he wanted it to. The chapters are General Problems and General Obstinacy.**

From the Happily Ever After chapter 'Unblocked':

 _I don't understand why you and Kylo never got together_ , Poe thought idly. He was still reflecting on his feelings of jealousy. _He's a fantastic guy._

Hux projected to him an image of Ren from a year earlier, helmeted, all in black, stalking around trying to be intimidating (and succeeding at it), along with Hux's simmering wrath at having to put up with this undisciplined 'person' of limited military background whom Snoke had assigned to share command of Hux's ship.

It didn't make an impression on Poe. _Okay, so he was scary. But you're both fantastic guys. There was nothing there? Ever?_

 _Why would there be? You might as well as me why I didn't fall in love with my chair, which at least has the redeeming features of being supportive and there for me at the end of a long day_. Hux sent him a second impression, which was a reminder that he didn't feel sexual attraction the way Poe did. Or at all, really. He liked his chair. Had more of a love/hate relationship with the bed, though. He missed them both. He especially missed that big wall screen.

Poe shrugged mentally. _Maybe I'm too hung up on Kylo being a good catch. I'm starting to think you're the one who should be jealous._

 _Of Kylo? Ha. No. If you leave me for him, you get what you deserve._

* * *

Hux downed the drink he'd poured for himself. It was low quality but high strength with a nasty burn that made him shiver and grimace. Hopefully it would serve its purpose and help him with oblivion. He was considering if he needed a second pour when he had a stab of unwarranted paranoia. Someone was watching him. Instead of reaching for the bottle, he touched at the handle of his knife, looking around carefully.

There was not much reason to be paranoid alone in his own quarters, off shift, about taking a drink. This stuff wasn't even contraband, although usage was regulated. Basically, you couldn't use it during emergency or combat protocols, nor could you imbibe more than a certain number of hours before on-shift. He wasn't in contravention of that, nor was he prone to unexplained anxiety. Unless the Force was involved. _Snoke?_

 _Yes._

 _Ah._ Then the headache began. He grimaced. Maybe it was the liquor (or maybe it was their last, less-than-oppressive conversation), but Hux actually expressed something about the discomfort. _Is there a way for this to happen that doesn't … impair me?_ He was certain this did not enhance his performance. Anything that made him averse about doing his duty was a problem waiting to be fixed. It was difficult not to flinch from this, no matter how stalwart he attempted to be.

 _Think on the events since you left on the shuttle. Recount them in your mind._

So that was what Snoke wanted to know? _I boarded the shuttle this morning. I ordered it to depart. Kylo Ren used the Force to destroy my datapad. We docked. I reported to the bridge. I-_

 _No._ Snoke's tone was patient. _Not a recitation such as you would put in a report. Think on it detail, as though you were going through it for clues._

 _As though it were my father's words?_ Snoke didn't respond. _Maybe not that detailed, then_ , Hux decided. _I boarded the shuttle. Ren was there. I ordered departure. I sat._ Hux remembered the moment – small jump seat folded down from the wall, his legs crossed to balance the datapad on his thigh, Kylo staring at him from the other side of the shuttle.

 _I reviewed messages on my datapad. I believed he was reading my mind. I told him not to … in a rude fashion. He destroyed my datapad. I confronted him. He demanded respect and told me to keep my thoughts to myself. I did know how to do this. He went to the forward compartment and we stayed separate for the remainder of the flight._

Snoke said nothing. The pain had faded from Hux's head, but he still had the sensation of being watched. He supposed he was being listened to, so he continued, visualizing the day as best he could.

 _We debarked. Ren accompanied me to the bridge, where I took Iegoh's report. The ship was at ready. I went to Ren. We argued again, this time about the Force. I escorted him to security and made sure he was set up properly in the system._

 _While they did processing, I went to my quarters, unpacked, and poured a cup of tea since I intended to work through the next shift with Peavey as we got underway. It would match up with my day shift. I went by security to pick Ren up. I found him the quartermaster's office requisitioning things. He and I went to the bridge. We argued yet again, this time over the contraband nature of my beverage and his continued complaint that he could not prevent himself from reading my thoughts._

 _We were on the bridge through shift change. I asked him our destination. He attempted to bypass me and told navigation to take us to the shipyard. They ignored him, as was their duty. I told Peavey to get us underway and he did. Ren informed Peavey and I of the mission in the ready room. We requisitioned appropriate ships upon reaching the shipyards and had a preliminary planning meeting with the commanders thereof. We are still at the shipyards. Tomorrow we will settle on final fleet composition before moving on ISR-458. I completed my shift. I am in my quarters now._

Snoke asked, _This is a longer than necessary method of communication. I can show you a more succinct one._

 _Thank you?_

 _See_. Hux shut his eyes, because what Snoke did overpowered his senses. _Remember_. Instead of a recitation of events, the memory itself unfolded through his mind. He'd put forward a few pieces of his day that way in the course of his monologue, but Snoke wanted it _all_ that way, as a continuous, complex stream.

He wanted Hux to go back through the events as though seeking to memorize them or searching for some missed piece of information. Snoke had taken in his perceptions directly when he'd toured the _Supremacy_ , this time he was doing the same but through memory. He showed this to Hux in some mental way that conveyed the idea and actions required without using words. Hux had the impression Snoke didn't know Basic words for it.

 _I …_ Hux hesitated because he was being asked to do a difficult thing, requiring concentration and focus he wasn't sure he had, _I think I can do that. In future, as you request._

 _That would be an improvement. Thinking along more than one portion of your timeline is a critical skill for self-discovery and reflection. Living in the moment is for Jedi._ Mentally, Snoke made an amused scoff.

 _Thank you,_ Hux thought, not sure what to make of the Jedi bit. _May I ask another thing of you in the interest of improving performance and productivity?_

 _What?_ Snoke's mental voice turned tense. Hux had asked for too many things. That was discouraging, but impossible to take back. He pressed on.

 _How do I guard my thoughts so they do not offend your apprentice?_ Hux had concern that he might think something and get himself inadvertently killed or injured. The words that left his mouth were often bad enough, but he kept his worst snark internal. It worried him that both Ren and Snoke seemed to think he could achieve this level of mental discipline.

 _Like this._ Snoke showed him directly how to still the surface of his mind. This, too, would require considerable mental strictness. Hux hoped it would become easier with practice, but even if it didn't, it would be worth the work not to be so transparent. At the conclusion of the demonstration, Snoke's presence cut off abruptly. He was alone again.

Hux poured himself another drink and spent the evening thinking back over the meeting they'd had with the other ship commanders and ground force leaders. What Snoke was asking wasn't far different from the rote memorization of Brendol's words – something Hux had learned early and practiced rigorously most of his life. It had been demanded of him – repeat back words until they were stuck in his head as much as any earworm song lyrics. This was a broader application, but it was like being asked to run when he had already mastered walking. It wasn't impossible.


	26. Office Politics

**A/N: The conquest of ISR-458 is told in somewhat more detail in the Knights of Ruin chapters "Simple Goals", "Combat Intermission", "In the Fire", "In the Air", and "In the Mud", all told from Kylo's POV. It can be summed up as 'they succeed'. This chapter is set at the very end of the conflict.**

* * *

"I suppose we could slag it from orbit," Hux offered, leaning over the console. The extraction process was nearly complete. Only one lone AT-M6 lingered, having tread across a section of ground hollowed out with subterranean chambers. The sensors should have picked it up and maybe they had, but in any case, the machine's front legs had broken through the ceiling of the space underneath. The unstable structure had then collapsed around them, trapping it. The standard lifting ships had failed to dislodge it. "Just disabling it isn't going to be enough. I don't want to leave any of our technology for them to scavenge."

"The self-destruct routine will take out all electronics, but we'd have to drop the operators back in to activate it," said the lieutenant Hux was working with. "If we did both, that might do it."

"The terms of their surrender were that we would halt our attack," Hux mused. "Orbital bombardment, even of our own unit, could be easily misconstrued. It's in the middle of a city."

Behind him, Hux heard parts of a report coming over the intercom: "Security - priority code - Kylo - killed - General Hux -"

Hux's head snapped around. Peavey was bent toward the console with Lt. Mitaka. Peavey looked up, caught his eye, and gave a grave nod. Hux turned back to the officer he'd been supervising. "I don't want to risk it not working. Hoist it out. Scramble additional ships as necessary. That's what we have them for. The airspace should be clear enough to use them." He strode over to find out what was going on.

Peavey said to the intercom, "Say again, Sergeant."

"This is Sergeant Rochter with Level Four security. This is a priority code event. Kylo Ren entered the tactical oversight bay and killed Lt. Phimitt with his lightsaber. Notify General Hux immediately."

"This is Hux. I-"

The bridge doors opened. Kylo Ren himself strode in, filthy from the hips down, still covered in caked dust and worse from his combat mission on the planet's surface. The smell of char and blood accompanied him, tainting the otherwise sterile atmosphere. "General Hux-"

"Did you kill Lt. Phimitt?"

"Yes. She was incompetent-"

"Unless she was attacking you at that moment, you are not authorized to lay a hand on my people!" Hux crossed the bridge, closing with Kylo Ren in such an aggressive manner that it made Kylo straighten and pull his head back.

Kylo growled, "Her incompetence caused the deaths of three of my troopers and endangered my life."

" _Your_ troopers?" Hux stayed in his face. "You killing her has endangered _your_ life!"

"Is that a threat?"

"It's a promise!"

Kylo pivoted and stepped away. With the helmet, it was impossible to be sure of his expression, but the body language read as discomfort with Hux confronting him so assertively. He probably didn't have to put up with that much in his life. Over his shoulder, Kylo said, "She was playing some game called Wig Wars while we were attempting to call for air support."

Hux hesitated. That didn't look good. Not at all. He'd have to investigate the accusation. But that was between Hux and his staff. "You killed one of my people without consulting me, without authorization!"

"You're being consulted now."

"And you're being reprimanded."

"You don't have the authority to reprimand me."

"You're on my ship. You can get off-" Hux's words were cut off by Kylo's backhand. It hit him hard across the face. Ren was a big man, as big as Brendol and a lot stronger. The blow was stunning and sent Hux staggering back to the wall. There was blood in his mouth from where his own teeth had cut his cheek. He blinked off the stars to see Ren approaching him.

It flitted through his mind that Ren hadn't hit him any mortal blow. This had been disciplinary – a correction. While Hux had tolerated such for years from his father and would have from any superior officer, Ren did not have that status. Nor was Hux going to allow him to claim it. There was a faint chance Hux's reaction would have been different had they been in private. They were not. They were on the bridge in front of his officers.

Hux pulled his knife and lunged. Ren dodged to the side with a fluid motion like a dancer. It was a good dodge, but not clean. Hux's knife sliced through fabric and snagged on the body armor at the bottom of his ribs. Hux should have pulled the blade _back_. Instead he pushed harder and sliced _out_ as he would have done with a normal blade – the sort he trained with. A monomolecular blade had many things going for it, but strength and resiliency were not among them. It cut easily through flesh and even most bone, but certain crystalline structures resisted it. Combat armor was designed to foil it, elsewise everyone would carry monomolecular-edged katanas.

Hux yanked the blade free and it broke, leaving him with the hilt and a stub. Before him was a very angry Sith. Hux still had a blaster, but before he had done more than recover his posture, there was a lit lightsaber between them like a horizontal bar. He went back a step before he caught himself, not wanting the appearance of retreating. Among other things, there was nowhere to go – the wall was right behind him. The lightsaber crackled ominously between them at the level of his waist. It could slice him in half well before his blaster cleared the holster. He did not reach for his blaster.

 _What's wrong with that lightsaber?_ ran through his mind, followed by mild surprise that the shoddy performance characteristics of Ren's blade would be his last thought. Then he realized it wasn't his last. He raised his eyes to meet Ren's mask, recognizing that Ren had to save face before this could be over.

Ren rotated the blade in a slow arc. It vibrated and hissed the whole while. The bridge was silent. Hux didn't have to ask why – he knew they were all watching. As recognized equals in rank, there was nothing anyone should do to interfere … unless Hux ordered it. He wouldn't give Ren the satisfaction. Nor would he pointlessly endanger his people like that.

Ren pulled back his arm and turned the saber so it was point-forward, the tip of it wavering in the air in front of Hux's face. Hux didn't flinch from it. He snarled instead. Ren slowly stabbed it forward over Hux's shoulder, within a few inches of his ear. Hux did his best not to flinch from it.

The blade made an unbearable screeching noise as it sunk into the bulkhead. For a moment, Hux thought that was all the display Ren would make, but then he tilted it sideways so the crossguard loomed into Hux's face. The smell of ozone was sharp. His nose itched. His snarl turned into a grimace. Hux finally had to pull his head back further and turn it to the side or else have it scorched by the erratic flickering of the blade. Even though he did, he could smell burned hair.

Ren clicked it off after Hux turned his head. It looked a lot like submission. Hux found that galling. He was sure Ren found it satisfying, which was why he'd stopped. Into the silence, though, there was another sound: _plink … plink_. Hux looked down.

Red blood dripped from a small protrusion from Ren's side – Hux's blade. The knife must have caught on the way out rather than in. It couldn't have been a deep cut, but it was a cut nonetheless and the blade funneled Ren's blood along it to drip out noisily. That was gratifying. A hint of a smile tightened Hux's lips. He didn't bother to guard his thought: _If it bleeds, I can kill it._

Ren turned his back on him and stalked from the bridge. Hux ignored the implied insult.

Hux exhaled and looked at the hilt of his knife. His hands were steady. That was nice to see. They wouldn't stay that way, he knew. The adrenaline dump would hit him soon as he'd shake like anyone else. He looked at the hole in the wall with melted metal around it that had been left by the malfunctioning laser sword. "Lt. Mitaka? Call a repair crew for this. And have a disposal crew pick up Phimitt's body. They're to put it in holding until informed otherwise. Captain?"

"Yes sir," Peavey said promptly.

"I'll need an investigation carried out for Ren's allegations and of course I'll need verification of Rochter's report – manner of death, circumstances around it, if there was a confrontation first or threats exchanged, etc." He examined the stub that was left of his knife. There was no blood on it, but it was still something to remind himself that Force users were mortal.

"Yes sir."

Hux glanced around the bridge. They were still silent, staring at him, waiting for orders. The shakes were starting now. He swallowed tensely, keeping his voice firm by effort of will. "Get back to work. There's nothing to see here." He moved over to the console he had been at before the incident. "Any update on the AT-M6 extraction?"


	27. Performance Review

**A/N: This would be the night of the same day as the last chapter.**

* * *

Hux hit send on the report and took a deep drink of the liquor he'd poured himself. There was a default format for these reports. Hux had stuck to it. It did not include a section for stabbing one's co-commander on the bridge or for singeing a general's sideburn with a lightsaber. It sounded almost childish when put that way. He played with the concept mentally, weighing the different points of view on childishness. Most people idealized them, inappropriately, in Hux's opinion (and his father's). Children made the best killers.

He was as good an example of it as any – as he'd aged, he'd developed compunctions. It was why he now entertained regrets about trying to eviscerate Ren. It was a complicated situation. He took another drink. As an adult, he understood that more than he would have as a child, when things were merely an issue of following the orders he'd been given.

Speaking of which, he sensed a presence. He'd been more or less waiting for it – hence the alcohol. Snoke thought to him, _Your report has arrived. Review it for me._

 _Of course_. Hux complied, working through the mission from their arrival at ISR-458 through the present. He reviewed units deployed and lost, objectives attained, and current status – all information in his submitted report – but the mental contact allowed him to give more detail on the matters he considered important. He had drank enough that he was relaxed, but not yet impaired. He was aware of what a dangerous and fine line that was.

Snoke had few questions to interrupt him with. At the conclusion, he asked, _Would you regard this as a successful mission?_

 _Yes._

 _In which respects?_

 _Several. It is my opinion this was a training mission to prepare the Order for conquest of the New Republic. You may be assessing the capabilities of specific individuals and units. Such an isolated, low technology world poses little risk to us, and outside of such experience, little reward. We lost nothing of significance and exposed several weaknesses we can now rectify and tactical errors we will not repeat._

 _Which individuals do you think I was testing?_

 _Kylo Ren for one. Perhaps myself. The ship captains. I found-_

 _Ren only. The rest are insignificant. Describe to me Ren's performance._

Hux tried to avoid mentally voicing his irritation at the interruption and his own 'insignificance' in Snoke's eyes, but it was there, palpably. He focused on the question. _Ren is naïve. He believes-_ A jolt of pain shot through his left side, from his cheek down his ribs and partly down his leg. He twitched and shifted in the chair. It was a strange, asymmetrical pain compared to others he'd had at Snoke's hand. He supposed it had something to do with the distance.

 _You will give me a description, without moralizing with your opinion._

Hux recalibrated and tried again. _He interfaced poorly in briefings on-ship, demonstrating an incomplete grasp of the logistics of the operation and the capabilities of the units he was deploying with._ He paused, waiting for punishment for something so opinion-laden, but there was none.

Hux continued. _Once deployed, the units he was with personally moved quickly, outpacing the rest and relegating surrounding units to support roles. He required resource reallocation multiple times due to failure to synchronize with the larger ground force. It was inefficient. (Though flashy. Glory-seeking.)_ Hux tried not to think that, but it was impossible.

He hurried on. _His idea to eliminate the enemy's air units resulted in a near-catastrophic endangerment of the_ Finalizer _itself. I have not yet had the opportunity to fully evaluate that engagement, but the objective was not achieved. It did lead our enemies to be more judicious in air deployments, so there was that._

 _In individual actions, he was successful in his objectives, showed bravery and aggression, and gained experience both as a leader and as a live combat participant. His failings tend to the strategic, not tactical. If I may … perhaps relevant to your interest in testing him …? I have noted an increasing trend of … affiliation with the First Order from him. Including considering the troopers he served with as his own._

Hux stopped when his head ached. Snoke was digging for something. It seemed simpler to wait until he had it before continuing. Several images flashed in his mind, projected there by Snoke: Ren's lightsaber in his face, the droplets of blood on the deck, the taste of his own blood in his mouth. _You were not going to disclose this to me?_ Snoke's mental voice was a dangerous whisper, like fine silk over a knife – a pretense of concealment that hid nothing.

Hux was abruptly very tired, irritable, and angry. He was going to be punished and he knew it. He wished briefly that he'd completed the report in his office, where he'd started it. As he'd neared the end, he'd come to his quarters because the liquor was here. It wasn't so much that he believed in the influence of the Abyssian ornament, but maybe Snoke did. Maybe Snoke wouldn't try to hurt him if he was sitting in his chair under it. But he wasn't there. With resignation, he answered the question that had been posed, _No. It was not relevant._

 _Two of my chief agents attempting to slaughter one another is not relevant to me? You presume too much!_ He was slammed face-first into the table, narrowly missing the liquor glass. Pro: the custom-made table from salvaged hull plating was exceptionally stout; it was undamaged. Con: his face took the full brunt of it. He lost consciousness.

He woke to find himself pinned to the floor, with a feeling like he was pressed against blazing hot metal. He pushed, trying to lift himself, but it was pointless. He collapsed, whimpering before he could stop himself, muscles jerking as he tried ineffectually to writhe. His mind fragmented into terror and pain and groveling.

The grip on him evaporated and Hux lurched to his hands and knees. A moment later, he escaped to the couch, getting himself off the floor entirely (and not coincidentally onto a softer object should Snoke make free with telekinesis again). He tried not to cower, but he did anyway. He was ready to flinch at the slightest sign, despite knowing there would be none – no hands reaching for him, no visible warning.

Too many images of violence and torment flitted through his still stuttering mind, concussed and bewildered. He couldn't trust anything, anyone, not even his own body. There was nowhere to go. Nothing to do but cringe. He didn't even have his knife. He was so afraid he felt a pressure in his bladder that he barely controlled.

His face ached. His nose was bleeding. He could sense Snoke's awareness pilfering through his mind for whatever errant scraps of information he wanted. Hux noted absently and clinically that his subjective experience suggested Snoke was unfamiliar with the limitations of the human body. He suspected he hadn't intended to knock him out cold. It was something to think about while his mind was being violated.

Snoke was still angry. _I would have thought you had enough strategic sense of your own not to endanger one of the Order's greatest assets!_

 _Me?_ He was an asset? Ren had called him the foremost general. Where had Ren heard that? From Snoke? It had to have been.

 _Not you! You were in no danger!_

 _Oh. Yes._ Hux supposed that might be true. Ren's blow had been calculated for maximum offense and minimum injury. His antics with the lightsaber were for show. Of course Snoke did not count Hux as an asset. He supposed he was more of an obstacle, useful only due to durability and persistence. He began to slowly sag into the couch, his mind dulling as he tried to pull himself together.

Snoke monologued at him. _Kylo Ren is a rare gem the likes of which few ever know. His breeding is impeccable, a purity that is not an inbred singularity or an unblemished profusion of sameness, but instead the culmination in wise choices for outbreeding. He is a perfect lattice for channeling the Force – properly attuned, he will be greater than any who have come before._

 _You could have been as great yourself. But you are less than your potential. Ignoble creature. A mistake. Keep your vile talons from Kylo Ren's flesh. He will be the weapon, the_ true _weapon, I will wield against the galaxy! You are nothing but the stone upon which the iron is sharpened._

Ah. Yes. Kylo Ren was special. Hux was not. Ren had … accomplished so much in his life in comparison. Hux tried not to think this, but the sarcasm was there anyway even if he managed to keep himself from mentally verbalizing it.

Still, for some reason, Snoke seemed to calm. He had to have heard that quiet almost-a-thought, but he let it go. _You know nothing of him. One day you will bow to him. Vex me further on this subject and that day will be soon._

Hux wanted to lash out, but as usual, there was nothing here except the specter of consequences for further insolence. He was lucky that he had gotten away with what he had. He was not such an idiot to keep it up. _Yes, Leader Snoke._ He was tired again, and shaking for the second time today. He just wanted to be left alone. Eventually, he was.


	28. Ergonomics

Captain Phasma met him in the entry area for the exercise rooms. She was still in full armor, which was the normal state for infantry even aboard ship, but it was abnormal given the hour. Her armor was missing much of its usual luster indicating she'd been wearing continuously since the morning. She'd been involved in the ground action just as Ren, but either hadn't gotten quite so dirty, or had taken the time to clean up. Knowing her, Hux suspected the latter. Her armor was as much her uniform as Hux's was his, which he was how he was dressed.

"I'm aware of the time," he told her. Hidden in that was a 'thank you for coming' that he was sure she'd understand. This was well outside her duty obligations.

"What did you have in mind?" she asked.

"Something grueling that will keep my mind off things." He hadn't been able to sleep. If it had just been the stims, or the alcohol, or the lingering adrenaline from the day, he might have been able to cope. But he kept finding himself twitching at every suspicion that he wasn't mentally alone and there was nothing to be done about that.

Phasma cocked her head slightly at him. His nose was swollen and he had a goose egg over one brow. He wondered what she'd heard, if anything, about his conflict with Ren, although neither of these injuries had come from their confrontation on the bridge. She suggested, "Full contact grappling."

"No. Not that. Less contact." He gestured and they went inside to the changing area.

"Grueling," Phasma said. "But competitive?"

"Yes."

"Boxing?"

He considered it. "I had a bloody nose earlier. Does that matter?"

"No." She took off her helmet. "You'll be wearing headgear."

"Will you?" He didn't want to be coddled.

"Yes." She was taking off her armor, having found a bin that suited her to stow it in. Hux took one a few lengths away and started to disrobe as well. She asked him, "I heard you traded blows with Leader Snoke's apprentice, Lord Ren."

Ah, so she had heard after all. "Yes." He didn't comment on the speed of the news getting to her. Troopers were everywhere on the ship. What they saw and heard inevitably filtered back to her. It was probably the talk of the ship. While Hux had not experienced a complete victory, he'd drawn blood and walked away unscathed (aside from a bit of sideburn having lived up to its name).

"What kind of fighter is he?"

"Graceful. Quick. He has a serviceable field of vision in his helmet. The armor under those robes must be segmented." It was a stroke of luck that he'd managed to find a seam at all.

"The troopers speak well of him from the battlefield. He was direct and not given to excesses."

"Excesses? On the battlefield?"

"Sadism, trophy collection, distractions."

"Ah. Yes. Well, we can go over that in more detail tomorrow, in the after-action debrief." He pulled on his exercise clothes and wandered over to find boxing gloves. "I haven't boxed since I was in the academy. I seem to recall Sloane was quite the pugilist. I really ought to honor her memory by doing this more often." He missed her. If she'd still been around, he wouldn't be here, jarred to the core by the leader of the First Order and his arcane ox shit.

He fastened his gloves, then realized that with gloves on, he didn't have the dexterity he'd need for the headgear. But by then, Phasma was next to him. She picked up the framework helmet and settled it on his head, seeing to the straps efficiently.

"You must be tired," he said. When he'd commed her, she'd still been awake and on duty, although her shift should have ended hours ago. This planetary assault was her first time into the fray as a commander of the First Order as much as it was for the rest of them.

"And you. But you still called." She turned to select her own protective gear and fastened it on before pulling out a pair of gloves. She tossed them back and sorted for another, going through two more before getting a pair she was happy with. Hux couldn't tell what the basis of rejection was, nor did he ask.

They moved into one of the exercise rooms – large with padded walls and floor. The floor was marked with a central circle they'd use as their ring and other markings they didn't need. Phasma told him, "Stretch first," when he took a combative position near the middle. He nodded and moved offline, watching and then duplicating her stretches.

They started with fingers and hands, then wrists and forearms, then limbering the shoulders and working range of motion for the arms. He felt the stretch of muscle and pull of tendon. It put his awareness back in his body – moving it, manipulating it, regaining a sense of agency that had been taken from him. He was naturally flexible. It felt good to push that to its limits.

Next were feet, ankles, shin and calf, then hips and pelvis. Twist the back, stretch the core, arch the body. They went to the floor after that, stretching hamstrings and quadriceps, inner thigh and glutes. Then more stretches for core and back. Finally, the neck.

Phasma rose graceful and poised. He attempted to do likewise. "Maybe this was all I needed," he said. "I feel able to sleep already."

"I can help." There was a hint of snark in Phasma's voice.

He chuckled. "You propose to knock me out, hm? Let's see if you can." He raised his fists against her.

She was unimpressed and made no motion to fight him. "Warm up is second."

"Ah." He put his hands down. "What does that entail?"

She walked him through a shadowboxing routine – jab, jab, off-hand jab, hook. As he repeated it, she walked around him, adjusting his stance and talking him through how to shift his weight, flex his knees, and strike from the hips. Then she corrected the strikes themselves. Another routine – hook, hook, upper cut, off-hand jab – and more corrections.

They went through that twice more before she moved in front of him and settled at striking range with her mitts up. "Same. Strike my hands." She ran him through short drills for power, accuracy, sensitivity, and speed. The trainers he'd had at the academy were no slouches, but she was better. She watched his body language, his eyes, his expression; she listened to his breathing and grunts of exertion; she noticed his patterns and his tells. Then she pointed these out to him, prompting him to improve in ways he hadn't even known he was deficient.

"I have discovered your diabolical plan," he said as he panted at the end of the last speed drill. She cocked an inquiring brow at him, so he explained, "You're going to get me too exhausted to fight you."

She made the smallest shake of her head. "It's not me you're trying to fight, is it?"

She read him too easily, although then again, he'd told her as much when they'd started. He bared his teeth at her in silent answer, raising his fists. She gave him a toothy grin in return and finally faced off with him for real. Or, real enough.

By the time he returned to his quarters, he was bruised and sore all over. He'd trained with Phasma before, but never so physically, nor had she been so thorough. She'd given him what he needed – to get out of his head and back into his body. He slept well.

* * *

 **A/N: Yes, they did just get naked and redressed right next to each other. First Order prudishness centers on licentious contact, not the body itself.**


	29. After-Action Review

The top-level after-action review meeting included all primary and secondary commanding officers of major military units and support departments. The XOs and COs of the other ships were there by hologram. All told, it made for a crowded room, even though they were in the largest of the executive-level conference rooms on the _Finalizer_. It was important that they all be together for this.

"We may as well get started," Hux said with a small smile. "I doubt Ren will be joining us." That was an absence he didn't mind.

"After yesterday?" Major Vannd said. She went on carefully, "Is there anything we should be doing in regard to that?" It was a diplomatic way of asking if Hux wanted action taken.

"No," Hux said. "Leader Snoke is aware and I am sure he will take it up with Ren in whatever capacity he so desires." He'd woke up to find the knot on his forehead just as present as before, with headache, lingering nausea, nose tender, and eye well on the way to blacking. He could have prevented all that with proper medical care the evening before. Instead, he'd spent it gaining less visible minor injuries and a precious measure of inner peace. Despite the pain, he was in a good mood. He wouldn't have time to treat himself properly until after this meeting.

"Is Lord Ren … well?" Peavey asked.

"I-" Hux wondered what Snoke might do to Ren for the incident. Ren had, after all, struck him first. Even if one exempted the death of Phimitt, Ren had started the confrontation as far as such things were judged in the culture and law of the First Order. Striking a non-subordinate was not allowed and excused just about anything Hux did in immediate retaliation. "Do you have reason to believe he is not?"

Peavey's gaze swept over the rest of Hux's face. "I was on the bridge with you, sir. You have … additional injuries."

"These are not to Ren's credit."

"Is our security adequate?" Peavey glanced over to Captain Opan, who was in charge of internal security and presumably, keeping the upper ranks safe from assault.

"Yes, it is." Hux wondered why Peavey was so concerned about such superficial damage. He considered mentioning that he'd gone boxing with Phasma, but that would immediately lead to problems for her. Inflicting repeated head trauma on a general, even by accident, was literally criminally negligent given the rank involved. "I suppose my command staff does need an explanation. Leader Snoke expressed his feelings to me concerning the stabbing of his apprentice." Now there was no crime at all.

"Snoke has agents here?" Peavey shot another glance at Opan, who was stone-faced as he usually was in public, then at Kaplan, who was the next most likely to know about an unexpected docking.

"Of course he does," Hux said. " _I'm_ here." Peavey blinked at him and pulled his head back. So did many others at the table. Hux had never been quite so direct about Snoke's role in his life. "And as you can see," he gestured at his face, "his enforcers need not be present for him to have an effect. Snoke is anywhere he wishes to turn his attention to. There is no ship or planet outside his reach so far as I know. Something you would all be wise to keep in mind."

There was a beat of silence before Hux went on, "To business. It would seem we have won through on ISR-458. There will remain at least a week of negotiations to be followed by months of diplomatic work that we will probably not be involved in. The main part is done: making it clear to the population that submission to Order is mandatory. Our first goal in this staff meeting is a high-level summary of events, to be followed by a department-by-department review of what was done well, what was not, and what will be done to improve performance in future.

"None of us have had the time to do a thorough review. However, it is important to acknowledge our immediate impressions. Each department will do a deeper analysis and we'll meet back in a week to discuss those findings. Now, to begin," Hux pressed a button and rose. The queued presentation lit the air over the table with a holographic display of the planet and their ships as they had been arrayed on their first day here. "I will walk us through a very compressed version of the last four days, for the benefit of those departments not privileged with an overall view."

* * *

He clicked off the battle review. "Overall – what went well: the rescue of the _Finalizer_. Our defense against the fusillade was flawless. From what I've seen, not a single department stumbled. If they had, most of us would not be here. When the warheads hit, all of us were holding our breath to see if the damage was limited enough that our systems could reboot in time, or if gravity would do us in like the _Ravager_ at Jakku. That would have been a truly humiliating way to go," he told them. "Shot down by primitives chucking rocket-powered spears at us."

Hux straightened. "Which brings me to what we did wrong: we took an aggressive approach when our designs would have just as easily been achieved with a conservative one. We were under no time pressure here, so why did we over-reach ourselves?"

There was some shifting around the table, but no one said anything, not familiar enough with him as a commander to know if the question was rhetorical or real. Hux leaned forward, both hands on the table. "I know it was Ren's plan, but we had input on the execution of it. None of us cautioned him about over-extending ourselves, myself included. I ask again, what prevented us from doing our duty? I don't believe it was a lack of courage."

No one answered. Hux sat back down. "Think on your answer to that, then. It very nearly got us killed. I will hold my comments about what we can do to improve, overall, until the various departments have spoken." He turned to Peavey. "Captain. Lead off on ship operations." Peavey nodded and stood.

* * *

At the end, Hux reclaimed the floor. "Last night, I was boxing with Captain Phasma. We did drills for form and accuracy before moving on to speed. She told me there was no point in doing something quickly if I was doing it incorrectly – I'd only be wrong faster that way.

"I said earlier our greatest flaw was in taking the wrong approach. It opened us to an attack we were barely able to defend against, because none of us imagined the enemy had enough nuclear weapons to destroy their own planet a hundred times over. That's a preposterous degree of weaponry and that's coming from me." He laughed disdainfully a few times before moving on.

"I wanted to hear everyone's suggestions by department – and they were good, you have my full support on those – but none of them address the overarching problem. We don't have good information on our enemies. We need to be certain we're conducting our efforts correctly or else we're just moving faster toward the wrong result. I propose we develop an outward-facing intelligence organization to bring us this information.

"Captain Opan, Major Birnham - Let's meet separately to review how this would impact your departments. There will be some reorganization among your personnel and a shift in focus."

Hux looked around the room. "Is there anyone else here who has information or background that might assist in improving our ability to gather accurate information on our targets?" Major Vannd shifted in her seat enough that she attracted attention, but she just pressed her lips together in silence. Nonetheless, Hux knew she had a lot of contacts outside the Order. Part of her job was to manage a procurement network.

Captain Rosall of the _Harbinger_ said, "I would like to have some input on such a thing, if it will be a resource available to me in future. I have some background I can share offline."

"Of course." Hux looked in Vannd's direction briefly. "These will be offline discussions, not for airing here and now. Anyone who wishes can contact me privately. We'll get something set up. I know this has been a long meeting coming at the end of several days of doubled shifts. Unless someone has pressing further business, we'll adjourn."

Hux looked around the table slowly, eyes lingering on each person in turn, noting their expressions. Most were tired and preoccupied – he ignored them. A few were watching the rest alertly in case someone said anything – they were worth watching. A smaller number looked like they had things to say but weren't willing to – he would follow up later with those. "Very well. Tomorrow we will start the departmental reviews. We are adjourned."

* * *

 **A/N: In my authorial opinion, the biggest 'what we did wrong' of the conquest of ISR-458 is consistent underestimation of the enemy. The First Order demonstrates this again over D'Qar and during the space section of the Battle of Crait. Since I know they're still making this mistake in the future, I can't really have them realizing the error two years beforehand. The basic problem of arrogance looks a lot like a lack of good information.**

 **The Earth's current, ridiculous level of armament is analogous to building a hundred Starkillers so they can all shoot the same planet at once. Even Armitage Hux thinks that's overkill.**


	30. Hostile Work Environment

"This morning's report," Hux said after they'd settled in to lunch aboard the _Finalizer_. "'FN-5642 removed from rolls.' Why?"

"Spaced," Phasma said.

Hux's brows rose. There was no delay in her answer. Only distaste. He dipped his head in further question.

"Rape," she elaborated.

"Ah." He'd reviewed the trooper's file, but there had been no note on cause of death. The trooper's performance was within norms. He assumed, given Phasma's forthright attitude, that FN-5642 was the perpetrator and not the victim. "Singular?"

"Yes." She met his eyes for a moment, angrily, as though offended at the implication that a single rape was not sufficient reason to space someone. Hux hadn't asked for that reason. He was more concerned that perhaps a pattern of behavior had been uncovered and there were multiple victims who would need attention.

"Accomplices?"

"None."

He nodded. That was good. The problem had been dealt with, then. But how did it happen in the first place? "Medication?"

"Taken."

"Instruments?"

She gave him an uncertain look, so Hux stepped outside their word game to make his meaning clear: "Did he use instrumentation or his own body to perpetrate the rape?"

"Himself."

"Pure human?"

"Yes."

He'd heard that near-humans sometimes had a penile bone like many mammals. As the regressive, xenophobic rumor went, the males were perpetually erect and capable; the females were instinctively receptive and interested. The species this was attributed to varied with the political leanings of the speaker. Hux had never seen any proof to either. In day to day behavior, it was the bigots who acted aberrant and problematic. The only reason he was asking was because he didn't know how a hormonally regulated pure human male could penetrate anyone. "Is it … possible?"

"Rape?"

"Erection."

"Oh." She blinked at him like it was a bizarre question to ask, like he should know whether the lower echelons were sexually capable. It wasn't the sort of thing he had any reason to know. "Yes," she told him.

"Increase the dosage?"

She shook her head. "Not sexual. Domination. Medication doesn't effect that."

"Ah. I did not know that." He considered the situation. It didn't sound like the sort of thing that was likely to propagate. Sometimes, people just weren't right. "Defective unit," he said with a shrug. "Use the reclamation system next time." There wasn't much in the way of paperwork aside from making sure the designation was made available for reassignment. Launching someone into space without a suit was a non-standard disciplinary method, but it wasn't like he hadn't used it himself in the past.

"The victim spaced him."

"Ah. That shows good initiative. Counseling needed?"

Phasma shook her head.

"Matter closed, then."


	31. Safety Violation

**A/N: I might fill in Hux's adventures at a later point, but they'll most likely be told from Kylo's POV in Knights of Ruin.**

 **The quote from Galen Erso is lifted from the text of Wookieepedia.**

* * *

Most of a year had passed since he'd been on Starkiller. When they'd returned, Hux had stood on the bridge viewport of the _Finalizer_ and found himself feeling unaccountably emotional about seeing the place again. He was tight in the chest, dry in the throat, and kept clenching his fists. Much of the external construction was complete. The place had the look of the finished design.

They weren't done on the inside, though, and that was why he'd been summoned back. That, and Leader Snoke's flagship, the _Supremacy_ , had been completed. Snoke would depart now from Starkiller, leaving Hux in charge for these last critical stages.

He assumed this meant Snoke didn't trust Cheskar and Seabron to continue the project themselves. This worried him. While Hux tried to comfort himself with Cheskar's logic that Snoke was merely assigning his best person to the job to make absolutely sure things went properly … he had a bad feeling about it. His fist clenched tighter where he was holding it behind his back.

* * *

"Cheskar? Cheskar?" The overhead lights in the lab were out, leaving it lit by consoles and some otherworldly, hazy glow from the right rear of the room. Line of sight wasn't clear to that corner, nor to any other part. Equipment, containers, and rocks were stacked precariously on tables and workbenches. Hux walked in a few paces and stopped at movement in the left rear corner.

He leaned to the side so he could see around a piece of test equipment that featured a score of vertical tubes filled with colored liquids. In the corner beyond was a crowd of droids huddled together closer than droids usually stood. Someone must have instructed them to stand like this, almost touching.

Hux remembered the holochess board Cheskar had been sitting next to while eating grapes and giving their opinion of Hux's promotion to general. The pieces had been clustered in the corners just like these droids. The droids peered back at him. They weren't even powered down. They were just waiting. Watching. None of them were combat units, Hux noted, but several had attachments that could rend flesh.

"Chief Engineer?" He heard a clatter to the right rear. The room wasn't so cavernous that Cheskar was lost in it. Hux just couldn't see them yet. He took a few steps toward the sound.

"Get out!" It was probably Cheskar's voice. It had been more than a year since Hux had heard it and it was rough, like the person wasn't used to using it. They coughed, then repeated, "Get out of here! I know what you're here for. You can't have it!"

Hux paused. "Cheskar. Do you hear me?" That much was clear, but was he understood?

A growling noise answered.

"Cheskar?" There was no second name, which was common among those who had chosen a name upon promotion. Technically, the system listed their original designation as an alternate, middle name and their graduating class as their family name. But Cheskar had chosen one name to be called by, so that was what Hux used. "Chief Engineer Cheskar. This is General Hux. I have come here to speak with you."

"You can't have it. They're always talking about taking it. Now they've sent you. I won't let you. I'll fight you. I can fight. I know how!"

"I came here to see you and to speak with you." Hux edged closer, finally catching a glimpse of where Cheskar had taken cover. They had a blaster pointed in Hux's direction. "Lanlisa said you have not left this lab for a very long time – months, she thinks. What is it you think people are going to take from you?"

"The crystal. It's … Snoke said … it's defective. I'm defective. They don't need me anymore. Or it. I don't know why they keep trying to take it away then. They can't destroy it. I won't let them!"

To Hux's left was a pile of rock, black and grey, covered with whitish granules. It looked like kyber fragments – enormous ones – and kyberite. To the right was the wall with a working surface fronting it. Mid-way down it was the crystal he assumed Cheskar spoke of. It was the source of most of the light in the room.

It was huge as kyber went – as long as a person was tall (or at least as tall as, say, Birnham, who was a fairly short person by human standards). It was greyish-green, like a dirty, watered-down emerald. Or the color of Hux's own eyes. It had fixtures set on either end, energizing it to create the glow.

"I have not come to destroy the crystal or to take it from you." This much was true for now. Carefully, Hux stepped out in the open. He had a blaster at his hip, but his hand was well clear of it. Cheskar was crouched behind the edge of the working surface, hidden by the cabinet except for a sliver of face and the barrel of their weapon.

"Why? Why are you here?"

"It's been a long time since I've seen you. I want to see you." Had they been friends? Was he allowed to use that word for someone with whom he'd had a strictly work-related relationship? Hux had no relationships which weren't work-related. It was why the dearth of messages from his team here had not been unexpected. What was there to say aside from answering the questions of Snoke's staff and the even rarer query from his team? Those had petered out after a few months, until he'd heard nothing for the last half year.

"You're not here for the crystal?"

"No." Hux looked at it again, lingeringly. "It _is_ beautiful, though. I feel more drawn to it than even before. You did a masterful job of faceting it." Out of the side of his vision, he could see Cheskar stand. Hux didn't look at them – the way you wouldn't look directly at a nerf that was uncertain of your intentions. Cheskar moved to the rock and put a hand on it possessively, lovingly. Only then did Hux look at them.

Cheskar's straight, chestnut hair was matted and oily. The hair on the sides of their head had grown out enough to make invisible the stylish quiff they had previously affected. There was no facial hair, which Hux found mildly surprising. He'd assumed Cheskar was biologically male. Of course, they might still be. It mattered little. The tan-colored skin was mottled with what looked like a rash on one cheek. There were bags under their eyes – what used to be brown eyes. Now they looked beige. Washed out. Cheskar was gaunt and no longer stood straight. The joints on their hands were swollen. They were in their early twenties, but looked twice that age. Their uniform was a ragged disgrace.

Hux looked them up and down, perceiving why Snoke had declared them defective. So this was what it meant to be tainted. He'd known it wasn't just mystical kark because too many sources referenced it, but none of them had been explicit in the symptoms.

"I know you told me not to touch it," Cheskar said, caressing the stone. "I don't think you understand. I had to. Eventually. It was the only way to understand how to cut it, to cut any of them. I did the faceting on the others, but then they didn't need me anymore. You have to touch them. You have to touch them to understand them." Cheskar's brows drew together in concern as they petted the rock.

"Hm," Hux said noncommittally. It was too late for blame. "I've seen the inventory. And the mega-crystals they've extracted, the ones they're holding in storage. You did a superb job on them as well."

"They're stable. This one isn't. Have they succeeded in calibrating the others yet?"

"No."

"Is that why you're here – to get me to do that?"

"No. I'm here for you."

"Then you must be here for this," Cheskar insisted, referencing the stone. "You never cared about me."

Hux wasn't sure how to answer that. He thought he'd cared. He thought he cared right now. He could have stayed away like the others and left Cheskar to continue to rot in here, obsessed and spiraling into mental decay. But here he was. Did that not matter?

Was this because he'd turned Cheskar down for sex? Was Cheskar right and he was just here for selfish reasons? His father had told him so often that no one did anything that wasn't selfish. Ever. Maybe he was just feeding his own ego and vanity while he ignored what Cheskar had really wanted out of him.

The most painful part was that even if he could change the past, Hux didn't think he would – his answer would be the same. Insufficient. He went back to what Cheskar seemed most interested in talking about in the present. "This was not listed as a usable crystal. What do you think you have here?"

"It's … It's what you said – beautiful. It's alive. Did you know that?"

"I've read as much. Crystalline life forms aren't unknown." Not that Hux cared much. Plants were alive and he had no problem eating them. Humans were alive and he was fine with taking their lives as well, under the right circumstances. His framework for right and wrong was duty and obedience. Only recently had he begun to entertain doubts about that.

"It wasn't … finished." Cheskar looked imploringly at Hux. "It's incomplete. Just like us. All of us, lesser beings maybe. Too soon. Too fast. Our lives are too short. I had to cut away the unformed parts. Leaving only this." Cheskar seemed struck by a sudden idea. "Wait, let me show you what I had to remove!" Cheskar tossed aside the blaster so they could pick up a clear cannister filled with kyberite.

"See?" Cheskar said, pushing the container at Hux.

Hux stepped back quickly, repelled by the stuff and the irrational concern Cheskar might dump it on him. Something was very not-right about it. "What is that?"

"This was the heart. This was at the core of that massive crystal chunk we dug out, the one you and I walked around, the one you said not to touch. This is … ruined. Spoiled. You can feel it, right?"

"I feel it. Get that away from me. Put it down."

Cheskar shot him a loose smirk, maybe a sneer, and returned the cannister to the table. "I had to cut that away, draw out the poison, and free the rest. This piece." They went back to the enormous shard and stroked it. "Look. Look close. Do you see this grid pattern?"

Hux eyed Cheskar, then did as bade. He could see black veining through the smoky, greenish rock. "I see it. What is that?"

Cheskar laughed a little, high and reedy. "I don't know. It fluoresces gold when I energize it."

Hux gave them a side-eye. "You really shouldn't be energizing an unstable kyber, especially of this size. You could blow up the entire planet."

"No. Just a chunk of it. I've done the calculations. Maybe twenty percent."

Hux's brow furrowed, but he felt a loosening in his chest for the first time since coming in here. There was still some of the old Cheskar he knew in there. "And you don't think that's significant?"

"It's not the entire planet."

Bickering, this sort of back-and-forth banter, was a relief. "Oh? The shock wave would destabilize the remainder. We've excavated too much to keep integrity in the face of an explosion of that magnitude."

Cheskar leaned against the table, looking thoughtfully at the floor. "Yeah, it probably would."

Hux chuckled and deliberately copied Cheskar's relaxed pose. "If you've been energizing it, have you at least been keeping data?"

"Uh-" Cheskar swallowed whatever they'd been about to say, looking up at Hux with a marveling expression. "Data?"

"Yes?"

"You care about that?"

"Why wouldn't I?"

"They were going to throw it away. Snoke said to. Said we didn't need it. It was trash. You care?" Cheskar's building excitement was palpable.

Hux raised his brows slightly, looking from the rock to the person. "Cheskar, you're the one who convinced me that Snoke has very definite goals, probably personal in nature. He wants Starkiller. He wants the _Supremacy_. He wants Kylo Ren. But he has no use for refugees, children, money, or this." He gestured at the stone. "He is our leader, but he is not the Order. If there is a use for this, then we will use it."

"And if there's not?"

"Then you can throw a blanket over it and use it in your bedchamber for all I care." He chuckled slightly, pretending he didn't care, pretending that would be possible and he'd allow it when it was so obviously the source of Cheskar's problems. "That's what you wanted it for to start with, didn't you?" Hux cut his eyes at the rock slyly. "It's about the right size."

Cheskar stared at him in delight, taken in by the act. "Really? Really? You're serious? You aren't going to take it?"

"What would I do with it? But you never answered my question. Have you kept data on the cycles?"

"Yes, yes, I have!" Cheskar rushed over to retrieve a datapad. They thrust it into Hux's hands, babbling, "I don't- I don't understand. The others just left me. They left. They wouldn't talk to me. I was a pariah. They said I had to, to give it up. To … get help. They said I was deranged. You don't … you don't think I am?"

"That's not really my area." He skimmed over the files, pointing his eyes at the information but not paying much attention to it. He was focused on the rasping sound of Cheskar's voice and the reek coming off them. He was thinking about what he was being told and comparing it to what Jarkame and Lanlisa had told him of Cheskar's descent into madness. "But you shouldn't blame them. It is difficult to take a stand against Snoke. You know that."

"How are _you_ going to do it? What do we have to do?" Cheskar reached over and stirred the blaster where he'd discarded it on the table. "I can fight."

"You don't have to. Snoke has left. I'm in charge here now."

"Did he … did he tell you to kill me?"

"No. He gave me no orders whatsoever in regard to you. Or the crystal. I am to complete Starkiller Base. That's all. It was, by the way, the rest of your team here who told me where to find you and insisted I try to help."

"What … help?"

That was the wrong word to use – Hux could see it on Cheskar's face. He continued, though, not knowing what else to say. "You're still a chief engineer. I would like to have your input on the project."

"What about … this?" They gestured at the crystal, concern on their features.

"What about it? We can decide that later. As I said, you can keep it wherever you like, but I'd suggest somewhere that others won't stumble upon it. This lab is fine. Your quarters. Maybe somewhere else secure if you're-"

"No." Cheskar's voice was sharp.

"Very well. We are in agreement." Hux moved on as smoothly as he could. "But there are a few things I'd like to see done first."

"What?" Suspicion colored their tone.

"I'd like to have a grooming droid come see to you and bring you fresh clothes. Do you remember when we didn't have grooming droids here?" Hux made himself laugh lightly. Cheskar relaxed some and nodded, smiling along but not looking very invested in the emotion. Hux went on, "I'd have a good meal brought to you. When was the last time you ate?"

Cheskar swallowed and licked their lips. The smile slipped away. "I'm not … I'm not hungry much anymore."

"Do you think you have radiation sickness?" Hux asked with a casual tone, like they were discussing something unimportant.

"No. Kyber … kyber sickness."

"There's no such thing," Hux said, though the proof was standing in front of him. "They're very stable, at least chemically. We discussed it – no need for protective equipment."

Cheskar shook their head. "No. There is. Erso wrote about it extensively. It was why they didn't … couldn't use synthetic kyber for the Death Star. He said, 'their artificial nature made them highly unstable and explosive … Those that worked in proximity to them would experience headaches and a loss of sleep, becoming incessantly fanatic and fixated over the crystal …'" Their voice trailed off.

"He said that, did he?" Hux knew perfectly well what Erso had written. It was why he was being so careful with Cheskar. He knew this wasn't Cheskar's fault. They'd been corrupted, poisoned, addicted. But they were still a person – one whom Hux knew and … cared about, whether it was selfish or not. Erso had said there was no cure.

"You know he did," Cheskar said with a frown at him. "I know he did. He said the same applied to false kyber – to those crystals that had impurities." Cheskar put a hand on the crystal. "Hux. This is not false. It's just … immature."

Hux looked at it for a moment. He'd never read anything about the crystals having a life cycle or a maturity phase. They were rocks. They went through formational stages. That was all. But he played along with Cheskar's theory. "What happens to it now that you've faceted it? Does it continue to mature somehow?"

"No … No." Cheskar was silent for a long beat, looking at the floor. "It's done. It can't develop anymore. What I did to it … stopped it." They said soberly, "I'm sick, Hux. I'm not going to make it. Snoke was right."

"What?" He did not like the tired, defeated turn of Cheskar's voice.

"Will you take care of it?" Cheskar gestured at the crystal, looking up at him.

"What do you want me to do?"

"Promise me you'll take care of it."

Hux's stomach dropped, images of Admiral Halcor dancing in his brain. "But … _you're_ taking care of it."

"Promise me!"

Hux swallowed. "I will."

Cheskar nodded absently and reached for the blaster. Hux threw himself on them without hesitation, having fully expected what he thought was an attempt at suicide. The two wrestled with it. Almost immediately, Cheskar swiveled it to point at Hux's head. He jerked out of the way as a shot scorched through the air he'd occupied. Why was Cheskar trying to kill him? Had that been an accident? Surely it was.

Three more shots blasted the ceiling as Hux twisted the weapon out of Cheskar's hand. Cheskar tried to grab it with their left, but only succeeded in knocking it from Hux's hand. The gun skittered across the floor, well away from both of them.

For a moment, they panted at the sudden exertion. Cheskar swayed. They stank up close like this. "Why-" Hux began. He hadn't noticed where Cheskar's right hand had gone until his own blaster was yanked from the holster on Hux's left hip. His training warred with instinct, but training won. Hux threw his hands wide and jerked back. Cheskar pulled away likewise, blaster extended in front of them, proving what had happened before was no accident. They pulled the trigger.

Hux's blaster was bio-locked. It was a proximity sensor, which was why he'd immediately let go. His hand wrapped around the grip while tussling with Cheskar would be enough to release the lock and get himself killed. Cheskar stared at the weapon, finger flexing on the immobile trigger. "Why are you doing this?" Hux asked as he waited for Cheskar to realize the futility of their position. "I'm no danger to you or the crystal." He felt betrayed and confused.

"It's just a rock to you! That's all its ever been. If you say you'll take care of it, you're lying. You're lying to me! This has all been a lie!" They were snarling now. "Every bit of it! Just a lie! To get close to me so you can take it away from me!"

"I promised …"

"Too easy," Cheskar sneered. They transferred the blaster to their left hand and reached over with their right to the control panel next to the glowing, grey-green stone. They pressed buttons.

"What are you doing?" He took a step forward, because he wasn't intimidated by a blaster that couldn't be fired.

"I'm taking care of it. I'm the only one who can. It's my responsibility anyway. It always was."

"No …" Hux saw enough of the indicators to know Cheskar was powering it up. Kyber crystals amplified energy. Properly faceted, with aligned lattices, they released more energy than they took in, in defiance of most physical laws. This was why they were ridiculously valuable to anyone possessed of enough technology to make use of one. Improperly faceted, misaligned, or simply impure – they still amplified energy, but the output was irregular. Put another way: they were bombs.

"Like I said," Cheskar paused to announce, "I've done the calculations."

Hux threw himself on the person for the second time, an instant before Cheskar could complete the commands to the system. They struggled with Hux trying to get a foot behind them and take them both to the floor, getting Cheskar's hands away from the controls and hopefully pinning them. It was rare for Hux to encounter someone lighter than he was, but Cheskar was hollowed out by the spectral poison the warped crystal had infected them with.

They both fell, but as they did, Cheskar brought the blaster up between them, barrel under Hux's chin. There was no indicator the lock had released, but Hux assumed it had. The body of the gun was pressed to his chest. With a quick hand between his neck and the barrel, he shoved it down … unintentionally pivoting the weapon. Cheskar pulled the trigger and took off the front of their own face and the top of their head with the shot.

Hux jerked back, his face covered by the fine mist of particulate matter ejected around a blaster impact area. It didn't go far, but he'd been on top of Cheskar, intimately close, a handspan away. He rose, staggered to the side, and retched. He smeared the stuff on his forehead and cheek, trying in vain to get it off. He only succeeded in contaminating his hands. He was thankful for his gloves.

* * *

"That went badly," Hux said to Lanlisa. He'd washed his face and stripped his gloves, but he didn't think his hair was clean. He could smell Cheskar on his clothes. He needed the refresher and a full uniform change, but people needed to be notified before he did that. He couldn't have people walking in on the body, however unlikely that might be. "They're dead."

"What happened?"

"They shot themself with my blaster. Paranoid, as you warned me."

"I thought all officer's blasters were locked."

"They are. They found a way. Quite determined." Hux let out a shaky breath and looked away. She was silent. He looked over to her when she said no more. "You don't believe me, do you?"

"I … If you say so, sir."

The corner of Hux's mouth curled up, but it wasn't happy. "I didn't kill them." There was a distance between them now, for which he blamed Snoke. The easy trust his team had had with him was broken. Everyone was suspicious now – of each other, of him. It was going to be a rough year.

"What … what now?" she asked finally.

"We bury them with the kyber."

"Not … the reclamation system?"

"No. Erso, Snoke, the others – they call it a contamination – what happened to Cheskar. I don't want to introduce that to our reclamation system and find out the hard way it was literally true. Call me superstitious if you wish, but I'll bury them in a traditional manner here on Starkiller, with the crystal. That's … that's my duty. I'll take care of it. Keep the rest out of the lab. I have to clean up."


	32. Calibrated Expectations

**A/N: Contrast this with Asleep on the Job.**

 **From Happily Ever After, "Dirty Laundry":**

Poe tilted his head. "So you acknowledge that what you were doing in the lab was attunement?"

"I do not!" The outrage didn't feel real.

"I don't think you're telling the truth." Poe was certain of it.

Hux scoffed again and said nothing.

"Let me ask you something," Poe said. "In that lab you worked in – did anyone else ever calibrate those crystals?"

"It was a very delicate operation!" Again with the false outrage.

"Uh-huh. One thing you do when you're lying is you stop answering the question. Like you said – a lie by omission is less dishonorable."

Hux sighed melodramatically. "You and your father are both insufferable. The only possible reason to marry into this family is to spare the rest of the galaxy from having to deal with you further." Poe grinned at him.

Hux continued in a more normal tone, "But for your information, there were two others who were able to master the calibration process. Not that this contradicts your theory, though, as they were assigned to my team by Snoke specifically for that purpose. He told me he anticipated that they'd prove more skilled than my former colleagues. He was correct."

* * *

"I have been able to successfully calibrate only one of the mega-crystals for the main firing sequence," Hux said in one of his rare personal meetings with Leader Snoke. He'd had other business on the _Supremacy_ and had dropped in mainly to see the new throne room. That, and he didn't know how to initiate mental contact. It had been more than a week since Snoke had been in his head.

Hux continued, "The … I have had other engineers attempt multiple times on the other two. I have tried them myself. The lattices will not align. Or if I get them that way, they shift on the other two crystals. They seem to have some manner of polarity that effects one another."

"They can only be attuned to one person at a time." Snoke looked less displeased than Hux expected at the news of the setback. "Have you tried …" Snoke blinked at him a few times, his mouth puckering. Into Hux's mind came a concept of blending and intermingling, a stage that came before dominance and possession. You had to understand before you could control. Maybe he meant assimilation.

"Did I, um, did I have the engineers touch the crystals with bare skin?" Hux asked, trying to translate the concept and why Snoke would insert it into the conversation at this point. It was rare that Snoke stumbled on getting his point across, but Hux recalled Cheskar telling him how Snoke had used telepathy for the same subject, years ago.

"Yes."

"Ah. No. After the matter with my chief engineer, I am reluctant to allow that." He was adamantly against it as a matter of fact, but also 'reluctant' to tell Snoke he wouldn't obey if ordered. What happened to Cheskar would happen to no one else on his watch, regardless of how his people looked at him now. He could feel Snoke sliding through his mind. There was no discomfort in the touch this time. Hux hated that, in a way, because it meant the pain all the other times had been unnecessary. Or just cruel. He didn't hide this thought from Snoke, whose lack of reaction was a confirmation itself.

A moment later, the mental presence ended and Snoke slumped over in his throne-like seat. He looked dead. Hux sighed and raised his brows with a 'really' expression. He'd seen this before, often enough to simply settle himself into parade rest and wait patiently. The guards did not shift, as though they knew Hux posed no danger to their master even while he was presumably defenseless. Hux kept his eyes fixed on Snoke the whole while, knowing the return of awareness could come at any time.

Some minutes later, Snoke's somnolent breathing shifted and Hux drew slightly more to attention. He focused his thoughts: _I am waiting. We were discussing my lack of enthusiasm for allowing my people to be driven insane by magic rocks._

Snoke swallowed and worked his tongue around his mouth in a leisurely fashion. "That is wise," Snoke said finally. "Find the electrician whom the crystals chose. Have him perform the operation. He will prove successful. He may touch them without harm."

"Sir?" Hux blinked at him. "I mean, Leader, um …? The electrician?" Were they still discussing the same subject?

"Basingi."

The name was vaguely familiar. Hux placed it eventually – a technician who'd been installing a splitter or some other device in the main channel when a kyber crystal as long as a finger fell out of the raw mineral of the wall and into his hand. Or so he said. He'd been delighted and amused, telling people freely about it. Hux had confiscated the stone when he found out and mandated training for all about the dangers of freely touching the things. At the time, he'd been more worried about Snoke than whatever psychic poison the crystals could give off.

Hux said, "He … he wouldn't know how." The calibration process was not merely a matter of spinning a few dials.

"Train him."

"Yes," Hux said, bewildered. "I will."

"You will need another." Snoke leaned forward, looking at his various red-robed guards appraisingly. The pair closest to him straightened, but then Snoke slouched back. "Take my shuttle pilot."

"Your pilot?" Hux supposed he really ought to just act like this all made perfect sense.

"The one from second shift, Onti. I can spare her. The other two can cover for her while I find another."

"I am to have a shuttle pilot and an electrician calibrate the remaining two kyber crystals for Starkiller Base's main firing assembly." He didn't ask it as a question.

Snoke's relaxed shrug was mocking. He made a dismissive gesture with one clawed hand. "Go."


	33. Company Man

**A/N: This is the story related in Happily Ever After, in the chapter "Mitaka Meets Snoke".**

 **Mild warning: Someone dies. There's some gruesome stuff. It's no worse than previous stuff in Star Performer.**

* * *

The presence of Lt. Dopheld Mitaka was an accident. He wasn't supposed to be there. To encounter one another on the same lift on a vessel the size of the _Supremacy_ , which was the ship of assignment for neither Hux nor Mitaka, was ridiculously unlikely. For it to happen when Lt. Mitaka had things he wanted to discuss with Hux was even less likely. But here he was.

General Marhod, whom Hux was accompanying to an audience with Leader Snoke, smiled indulgently and said, "By all means, Lieutenant, continue. It's good to see the younger staff showing such enthusiasm and work ethic."

"Thank you, sir," Mitaka said. Hux had to make an effort to keep his features immobile at the way Mitaka said it. One might not know from looking, but Mitaka and Hux were within a year of one another in age. But whereas most recognized Hux as the age he was, Mitaka was perennially mistaken for a subadult. It didn't help that there were many talented subadults who had recently entered service to confuse him with, but to be thought half his age so consistently had to be irritating. Hux was familiar enough with Mitaka's tone to affirm that was indeed the case.

Hux faced his own share of discrimination due to age. He felt genuine sympathy for Mitaka's plight. Marhod seemed oblivious, both to the slight, Mitaka's annoyance, and Hux's amusement. "Lieutenant?" Hux asked.

"Yes sir." Mitaka turned to him. "I checked into that discrepancy you asked about with the fuel cells. You were right. They'd skipped synchronization and overcharged them. It's going to take three days to-"

"Three days!" Hux chafed. They needed to be able to get the planet out of orbit within a week if they were to keep to the schedule for test firing. They'd have the star drained by then. If they couldn't fire up the engines, then they'd have to postpone everything.

"Yes sir?"

"Go on," he said irritably.

Mitaka continued stoically. "Three days to get replacements installed and synchronize the intake sensors correctly this time."

"We don't have three days," Hux said.

Marhod said, "Snoke been pushing you too hard on that planet-killer project?"

"He is pushing appropriately," Hux said, wondering what rock Marhod had been hiding under that he was still calling Starkiller Base 'that planet-killer project'. He didn't know much about the man except to recall his introduction at the sole meeting of the High Command Hux had attended.

He explained, "Delays cannot be tolerated. Especially when they're due to incompetence. This should have been tested-" while Snoke was in charge of Starkiller, back when the engines were installed to start with, rather than waiting until the last minute to see if they actually worked, "before."

Marhod said, "Mistakes are always going to be made. You know that, Hux."

"I do." He supposed it was better that he'd found the mistake. Because Hux would get it fixed, have someone reprimanded, and move on. Snoke would kill someone and then threaten other people with death unless they fixed it on some impossible timetable.

"Snoke should know that, too."

Mitaka watched silently, waiting for his betters to finish.

Hux told Marhod sourly, "I would not suggest you point that out to him when you meet him."

Marhod shook his head. The lift had reached their level and they exited. Mitaka followed. In retrospect, Hux should have told him that he'd get with him later. The lieutenant didn't need to witness the sort of disrespectful talk that came next. Marhod said, "What Snoke needs is to understand reality. He needs generals and admirals willing to stand up to him and explain how things work."

Hux gave the general a pointed stare as they walked, abruptly realizing the reason for this audience with Snoke. The pit of his stomach felt cold. This was not going to go well and he could think of nothing he could do to prevent that. "I think you are the one, sir, who is unaware of how things work."

Marhod shook his head. "I've heard about you, _Hux_. Your father wouldn't have done what you're doing. Everyone says you're a lickspittle. You're a young man, so maybe you don't know any better. I'm only trying to talk reason here. You don't know what's going on in the Order."

Hux gave him a scathing look. "Obviously Snoke knows or he wouldn't have called you. Were you friends with the late Admiral Halcor?"

"Hm?"

"You sound a great deal like him. Do you think insulting me is a good method of persuasion?" Hux looked at him in disdain.

"Talk to Allinine," Marhod urged him. "Come to the High Command meetings."

"Allinine should know better." Though perhaps she did, as it was Marhod who had been summoned instead of her. They were nearly to Snoke's throne room and there was no point in wasting further words with the general and getting himself implicated in whatever nascent treason the man was plotting. Mitaka, though, was a different matter. Too much had been said in front of him.

Hux started to turn to him just as a door slid open just a handful of feet before them. Four people emerged, all serious and silent. They headed out down the hall, three the opposite way, one past them. Hux, Marhod, and Mitaka waited politely. Just as the others cleared and they began to go forward again, Snoke himself exited the room.

What mood Snoke had when he left the room wasn't something Hux detected (and he had become quite the devoted student of Snoke's moods), but once Snoke's eyes settled on them, his features turned sullen. He looked as done with General Marhod as Hux had suspected. Then his eyes turned to Hux. "You need discernment." He raised a hand in a dismissive gesture.

Hux found himself slammed into the wall hard enough to knock the breath out of him. His skull hit with enough force to stagger him, sending him to his knees before he regained control of his body. His mind fixed on Snoke's words. He'd made a mistake – somewhere, somehow. Snoke was pointing it out to him.

Kind of him, really. Discernment. He needed some. Perhaps his timing was poor, coming on the heels of another meeting so closely. Maybe 'discernment' meant he should have checked in with Fuseb for the leader's schedule. Next time, he would rectify that oversight.

Then another thought – Mitaka. He was no more than a pace behind Hux. Things had been said in front of him that he shouldn't have heard, things Hux should have prevented him from hearing. And he would have, had he known such dangerous words were about to spill from Marhod's mouth. But he hadn't known and looking back he didn't know at which point he should have told the man to shut up (not that another general was beholden to do as he said).

It didn't matter now, because Mitaka knew there were active plots from within against the Order's leadership, Snoke knew Mitaka knew, and it was entirely possible Snoke would kill Mitaka or otherwise harm him for knowing, and thereby preserve his aura of invulnerability. (Which clearly Snoke was not invulnerable, or he wouldn't keep killing everyone who so much as thought about moving against him.)

Hux liked Mitaka. It was different from how he'd felt toward Cheskar, but he didn't want to see him dead. Especially for the crime of being in the wrong elevator and wishing to do his duty, relaying information Hux had asked him to get and doing it now rather than an hour or more later. He wasn't … tainted … by what he'd heard. Was he?

It took Hux very little time to think this. He rose unsteadily to his feet during most of it. Marhod was staring at him, then turned to face Snoke. Snoke looked contemptuous of him. There would be no correction, then, Hux knew. At least, not in the context of Marhod having an opportunity to improve his future thinking and performance. Snoke's hand curled into a claw and Marhod clutched at his throat.

To say the man gasped would have implied he was able to draw air, albeit tortuously. He was not. His mouth worked. His throat made wet sounds. His skin flushed. After enough seconds had passed for Marhod to realize what was happening, he fumbled at his waist and drew his blaster. Hux watched impassively, neither concerned for Leader Snoke's welfare nor hopeful that a shot might be gotten off. Marhod's trembling fingers dropped the weapon as Hux had expected. He collapsed a moment later.

Mitaka gasped. Hux did not turn, although this took focus. He wanted to do nothing that drew attention to the lieutenant. Snoke's fist was still clenched. Was he finishing Marhod, or had he turned to Mitaka? Or was he going to kill both of them? Or maybe all three?

Hux looked to the general, who was twitching and convulsing as his unconscious body put in a last valiant struggle to find air. It was denied, but his jerking was pronounced enough that Hux felt justified in taking a full step away from him for safety. It was with relief that he heard Mitaka take several steps away in quick succession at Hux's motion. He wouldn't have done that had he been dying.

Marhod's death, like any death from mere lack of oxygen, took long minutes of agonal spasms. Why Snoke chose to do it this way was not something Hux knew for sure. He seemed to relish killing people slowly for maximum impact on those present, so Hux assumed there was some lesson here he was supposed to be learning. Perhaps it was to impress upon him the need for the previously-mentioned discernment. Maybe he was supposed to have discerned the reason for Marhod's audience earlier in the process, and thus have taken the opportunity earlier to warn off Mitaka. Yes, that seemed more likely than the other options, although it would be a good idea to continue with the plan of checking with Fuseb.

He hoped Mitaka survived Hux's error. Hux began mentally reviewing Mitaka's virtues in case Snoke was listening. Mitaka was a quick study, patient and diligent. The enthusiasm Marhod had noticed was genuine. Dopheld had impressed Hux with how sincerely he wanted to do a good job and see the Order succeed. He'd studied the great leaders during the Galactic Civil War and spoken about his dream of serving with the next generation of leaders. It was a very noble aspiration. Losing Marhod made the Order stronger. Losing Mitaka would not. It was not Hux's decision either way and he would bow to Leader Snoke's judgement on it. This plea he made like a prayer.

Marhod's body finally slumped, thoroughly dead. His bladder released. Snoke's hand relaxed and fell to his side. "Clean that up." He turned and shuffled off towards the throne room.

"Yes sir," Hux said automatically. Practical and efficient, he moved to the corpse and took up an arm. He glanced over at Mitaka. The man's eyes were huge in his boyish face. He was leaning against the wall like he wanted to huddle into it and hide himself. "Help me," Hux ordered from where he crouched next to the body.

"He's dead."

Snoke had not yet reached the throne room. There was still time for him to turn around and take action. Quietly, Hux said in an even voice, "We were given an order. Your life may depend on following it. Help me."

Mitaka looked over Hux's head in Snoke's direction, then he moved to Hux's side. His hands shook and he took Marhod's sleeve instead of his cooling hand. The two of them pulled. "Where are we taking him?" Mitaka asked.

"Into this room. Out of sight." They dragged the corpse into the empty conference room, leaving a wet smear of urine behind him. Hux glanced up and down the corridor for witnesses when they were done, then shut the door. Mitaka moved to the garbage chute panel and vomited down it. Hux toggled the comm panel on the wall. "Connect me to hazardous waste disposal."

"Yes sir." A moment later, a different voice, "Waste disposal."

"This is General Hux. There is a human body in conference room A23 next to the throne room. It needs to be removed."

"Yes sir. Um, are the- um, do we need to alert medical services?"

"No. He's dead. He needs to stay that way." In the background, Mitaka heaved into the chute again. "Also, there is vomit in the garbage chute. Send a vent-scrubbing droid or something to clean that as well."

"Yes sir."

"And urine in the hallway."

"Yes sir?" The man sounded confused.

"This should be your highest priority. I am sure Leader Snoke does not want his area to remain soiled any longer than necessary. I suggest you move on it immediately."

"Yes, yes, it is, sir." His voice turned suitably motivated at the mention of Snoke. "On it, Commander. General. Sir." The line disconnected, which was a little improper. Hux rolled his eyes at the comm. He turned to Mitaka.

"Come with me. Where there's a conference room, there's usually a refresher near."

"What about … what about the general?"

"Waste disposal will send a squad of troopers to pick him up. That's their job. You're mine. You're not fit for duty at the moment. Let's fix that." Hux pointed him to the door. "Watch your step. Avoid the urine or you'll be cleaning it off your shoes."

"Oh …" He sounded like he might throw up again. They were silent as they went down the hall. As Hux had expected, there was a refresher near. It featured two toilets and one sink. Mitaka heaved over the sink, but nothing else came up. "He killed him!"

"Rinse your mouth. Wash your face. Put yourself back together," Hux said patiently. "Of course, he killed him. You heard what the general said. It was treason. You are fortunate you weren't killed for hearing it."

Mitaka looked at him and gulped.

"Rinse your mouth." Hux switched to one command at a time. He remembered walking Cheskar through a similar situation more than five years earlier.

Dopheld turned on the water, scooped some in his hand, and rinsed. He heaved again. He rinsed more. He held the sides of the sink and panted. "What do we do?"

"Absolute loyalty is the only option. Or death, I suppose, if you can't bring yourself to that. If you are loyal, obedient, and useful, then you will at least die an honorable man. Plus, Snoke does seem discriminating in who he kills. It's not random." Hux leaned against the wall. "Wash your face."

Mitaka scooped more water, splashed it messily on his face, and took the towel Hux handed to him. "You've done this before."

"Mm. It happens." He touched the knot on the side of his head. It hadn't bled, which was a blessing. He wondered idly if Snoke was precise enough with the Force to control that. He suspected he was supposed to have some feelings about these assaults instead of the numbness he felt.

"I'm serious," Mitaka asked, "what do we do? Is there … anything that can be done? The High Command?"

"Marhod was in the High Command. They will live longer if they keep to their purview as a judicial and advisory body."

" _You're_ in the High Command."

"Which was Snoke's design."

"But … the High Command confirms their own members. Are you saying Snoke appointed you?"

"That's above your grade, Lieutenant." Hux shrugged. Snoke was stacking the judiciary with his people. Even if they didn't have time to attend the meetings, they'd be able to vote as he directed should it come to it. Dryly, Hux said, "With Marhod's death, there will be another opening. Some existing member will nominate someone and the confirmation process will proceed. It's all legal and by the book."

For a moment, Hux's gaze was vacant and haunted before he pulled himself back together. It wouldn't do to show weakness. "I follow the orders of my superior officer, as we all should. As I said before, absolute loyalty is the only viable option." Mitaka swallowed and blinked. He looked like he was about to cry, an image exacerbated by his youthful looks and wet face. Hux was not fooled. "Have you ever seen death before?"

Although Dopheld shook his head, he said, "My grandmother died. But … she was very old. I was with her, at her bedside. We all were."

Hux smirked. 'Dopheld Mitaka' – as was obvious from the name, he was born to officers. "You didn't go to Grafson Academy then. My father made sure everyone who graduated from there saw the deaths of animals and spent some time with human corpses as well. Where were you trained?"

"Aboard ship. The _Harbinger_. My family was there. Still is." Mitaka wiped his face more slowly with the towel.

"You seem to be thinking now. That's good. As long as we're here on the _Supremacy_ , we need to see if there are any specialists aboard who can do the installation faster on the new fuel cells. As I mentioned, Snoke does not abide delays due to incompetence. Perhaps you see now why I push so hard to maintain our schedule?"

Mitaka nodded. He gave Hux a concerned look. "How? How do you work for him?"

"I work for the Order. He just happens to be in charge of it. One day, Lieutenant, the First Order will rule the galaxy. Our job is to make sure that happens. If that means working for Leader Snoke, then we work for Leader Snoke."


	34. Reprimand

The lieutenant commander looked understandably nervous as she brought the ensign into Hux's office on Starkiller Base. The chairs were off to the side, which wasn't unusual enough to explain her apprehension. She knew what they were there for – that was the cause of her tension. It would have been a breach of protocol if Hux hadn't told her. He stood behind his desk.

"Ensign Garjax," Hux said, addressing the young woman. "You have been officially reprimanded by your commanding officer for dishonorable conduct twice for harassment and assault on other soldiers. And once, by myself, as base commander. There will not be a second time."

Garjax stood a little stiffer – Hux's tone was probably just as alarming as his words. "What- what do you mean?"

"You are relieved of duty and of your commission. You are hereby discharged from service."

"A- what?" Discharge was so unheard of that the woman had no idea what Hux was talking about. Service was mandatory. No one was discharged. Hux's membership in the High Command had certain perks, one of which was passing summary judgment under certain circumstances.

"Commander, are you in witness of this?"

"Yes sir," the older woman said gravely.

It seemed a waste of a human being, but officers were only submitted to reprogramming for the most minor of offenses. Hux didn't consider this pattern of violent, aberrant behavior to be minor. He'd seen it too often as a by-product of his father's training. She was a violent, opportunistic bully who didn't follow orders when it came to curbing her impulses or redirecting them in approved ways. There was no reason to delay the inevitable. She was was no longer part of the Order. He pulled his blaster and shot her.

The former ensign jerked and fell, showing a little too much nervous system activity for Hux's liking. He rounded the desk and shot her again just in case she still had any shred of life in her. An extra blaster bolt was better than dealing with someone screaming in agony as soon as she was able to get a breath – not that that was likely. Hux supposed it looked bloodthirsty. He thought of it as pragmatic.

The lieutenant commander shrank back. Hux holstered his weapon and turned to her. "What especially bothered me in this case was that the victims had stopped making reports, but security footage showed the problem was continuing, sometimes even in your presence. But I never saw you directly witnessing it." Hux stared at her, wondering what to make of the fear in her eyes and the lack of guilt. Maybe she really had been as unobservant as it appeared on the video. "You may consider this your _first_ official reprimand."

He didn't have to say there would be no second one, though if it came to that he'd have to convene a panel before doing anything to someone of her rank. Still, she stiffened much the same way as Garjax had. And paled. "Yes sir."

"Now," he said in a slightly warmer tone, "the next time you have a discipline problem in your ranks, you will bring the matter to me immediately and we will discuss solutions. You will not look the other way and you will not tolerate misbehavior. Do you understand?"

"Yes sir!"

"Then you are dismissed."

She nodded, about-faced, and opened the door. Outside waited four troopers and a disposal droid. They stepped back for her to exit, then came inside to clean up. Hux pulled his chair over and finishing filing the appropriate forms in the system.


	35. Wage Slaves

**A/N: Somewhere along the line, someone in the First Order figured out that leaving a lot of abandoned but functional factories behind them was a bad idea. As we saw in A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, and The Last Jedi, as well as the Phasma book.**

The Otomok system contained the planets Hays Major (barely habitable) and Hays Minor (ice world). The latter was the homeworld of Rose and Paige Tico. Major export: crystalline ore.

Hux to Rose, TLJ deleted scene, as he picks up her pendant, which is a stylized symbol of her homeworld: "The Otomok system? That brings back memories."

Wookieepedia:

The First Order forced her people to mine their planet's resources to feed their war machine, then shelled them to test the results. Having lost everything they had to the First Order, Rose and her sister joined the Resistance to avenge their homeworld.

Also from Wookieepedia:

Hays Minor was a planet in the Otomok system that was the homeworld of Rose and Paige Tico. Prior to the pair joining the Resistance, the First Order used the world to test weapons and steal children to become stormtroopers.

* * *

Five ships loomed above the scintillating white and dull tan of the landscape of Hays Minor. Hux stood on the bridge of the _Finalizer_ , looking down at it. He could just make out the darker smudges that constituted the mining facilities and the cities that had grown up around them. "Are the harvest ships clear?"

"Yes sir," Mitaka confirmed from behind him.

"And the evacuation complete?"

"Yes sir."

"Well then. Seeing as the mining company has signed off on surrendering their claim to all remaining equipment and facilities, we can begin demolitions." He turned to Mitaka with a smile. "And, of course, the weapons testing. I am most interested to see how these new dreadnoughts perform against ground installations."

In the later stages of the _Supremacy_ 's construction, Drewmill's group had begun a new wave of ships – small in number, but exceptionally heavy in firepower. They were designed for planetary bombardment and the overwhelming of defense networks, not for interspace battles. They would be useful in retaking any New Republic worlds too valuable to destroy outright but too fortified to take otherwise.

"Yes sir," Mitaka said. "Shall I signal the barrage?"

"Oh, I suppose so. But first get me a visual on the initial target. Sephis Major, was it?"

Mitaka checked his notes. "Um, Sebris Alpha."

"Very well," he said dismissively. It was about the same thing and about to be rubble. Everyone who called it anything else was gone. "I want to see this in real-time. We might want to make adjustments to the targeting pattern on the other installations."

Mitaka set up a nearby screen to show the best resolution their scanners could provide. It was still a bit grainy. Hux decided to watch the first few volleys from where he was at, looking out the forward viewport. His hands were tucked behind his back.

"Fire at will," he said over his shoulder, listening as Mitaka relayed the signal to the two forbidding-looking dreadnoughts accompanying their three star destroyers. In a few moments, streaks of light showed the path of the plasma bolts fired from the accompanying vessels – one dreadnought on this target, the other on a second on the southern hemisphere.

Hux muttered to himself, "It might be worthwhile to do a bombardment with the destroyers first on one of the other facilities, just for comparison."

"Sir?" Mitaka asked.

"Nothing," Hux said. Silent explosions flared on the surface of the planet. They weren't as large as he'd expected. Clearly, things had been hit and were blowing up, but he'd been expecting bigger. His sense of perspective was skewed from watching old holos of Death Star superlasers against Jedha and Scarif.

He supposed the dreadnought's bolts lost a lot of power punching through the atmosphere as they did. That was good to know. There were some things that were impossible to visualize well from looking at the numbers. He moved over to the scanners to get a better look.

The destruction was clearer this way. He moved the viewing area across the target zone. Just outside the area, he could see small, dark dots moving in what was left of the streets. "That's a lot of movement." He narrowed his eyes and leaned closer. "Are those people or droids?"

Mitaka came over and stood next to him. Both of them stared at the screen, trying to make sense of what they were seeing. Like imperial weapons and the Republic before, First Order weapons tended to have specific radii of effect, with (relatively) little damage outside of it. The idea was that area of effect weapons should effect their targets only and nothing else. Superlasers were an exception, which was part of why their existence was considered an abomination by itself, in the opinion of most of the galaxy.

"Uh … I don't know," Mitaka said. "Wouldn't the mining company have taken their droids with them?"

"Of course they would have," Hux said. "Droids are valuable equipment. People? Not so much." He gave Mitaka a sharp look. "I asked you if the evacuation was complete."

"Well, it was. Sir." The lieutenant retreated to his workstation, checking the reports. "Colonel Kaplan said it was. Here, he attached the mining company's report that it was."

Hux imagined what it must be like to be down there, with a rain of destruction coming from above. The station was already functionally obliterated, but at least he could do something before the dreadnoughts moved on to their other targets. "Stop the bombardment."

"Yes sir."

* * *

Hux knew where this report was going. He sat behind his desk, tired already. He looked up at the colonel with an upset, long-suffering expression. "What you're telling me is that the mining company fired everyone they didn't want to bother evacuating. Is that it?"

"I suppose so, sir. Yes."

"And so the bases we're supposed to destroy, to prevent infestation by pirates, rebels, organized crime, or whatever, are now _already_ infested with the very workers who were left behind." He leaned back.

"Yes sir."

"To some extent, this is exactly why we're supposed to destroy these things – so that we don't leave a trail of struggling enterprises behind us, ripe for conversion into Rebel bases of operation. The only reason the corporation pulled out was because it's no longer economically viable. There may be enough left to scratch by on, but these things are magnets for illicit activity." Hux shook his head. "Did the harvest ships at least collect the children?"

"Some of them, sir."

"Some? Not all?"

"It's voluntary surrender only, sir."

"Yes, I know it's voluntary surrender, you idiot. I was there when the policy was drafted! But they didn't know we were going to _shell them_! They stayed because they thought the mining infrastructure would still be there for them – their jobs, their homes. Our orders are to destroy it. They won't have anything after we're done!" Hux gestured furiously from his seat.

Chastised, the colonel looked back and forth on the floor before agreeing, "Yes sir."

Hux scoffed, sighed, and looked away. "How many people are down there?" he snapped. If he evacuated the adults, they'd be enrolled as slaves. Except in very rare cases, that was all they'd ever be in the First Order. The Order had no broad-based social support system to handle adult refugees of uncertain loyalty. He was sure Snoke wouldn't stand for him transporting them anywhere else. Snoke barely allowed him to take in the children.

"I don't know sir. Our orders were- my orders were clear." He sounded apologetic.

"Yes," Hux said in a calm aside intended to sooth the man, "I know they were. I am not criticizing your conduct. You did what you were told to do." He put a hand over his mouth for a long moment, then dropped it to the desk. However disturbing the situation was, this wasn't his mission. "My orders are also clear. I want you to mobilize every combat pilot we have on shift. You can characterize it as another weapons test. I want their squadrons to strafe the mining facilities-"

"Standard armaments won't be effect-"

"I know. Be quiet. That's the point. I want them to strafe every factory we have listed for demolition. No shots at civilians. Run them out of the buildings. Let them flee to the residential sector. As soon as the squadrons are out of the way and we have visual confirmation from the pilots that the target zone is clear, we'll start the bombardment again. In the meantime, I will have the targeting crews tighten the spread so all we're hitting are the mining facilities. It's all I can think of. Do you have any better ideas? Or other ideas at all?"

"No … No sir."

"We'll need to send harvest ships back in a few months for whatever children are still here. The parents will change their minds after they've exhausted their food supply. The slave traders will be by after that for whoever is left."

"They might evacuate themselves in the meantime."

"True. If they do, then good for them. Not everyone has access to that. We'll send the ships back anyway."

* * *

 **A/N: The weapons thing is an attempt to give in-universe logic to a movie convention. In canon, grenades, bombs, mortars, and shells tend to kill everyone in a certain area, and no one outside it. There's a loud bang and maybe a little concussive force, but you don't get the blast effects these things cause in the real world, where they blow out ear drums, rupture eyes, collapse lungs, hemorrhage delicate bodily structures, and give concussions. To explain this, I say the galactic weapons have been designed to be all-or-nothing, just like we see in the movies. They either kill people or they don't. To do otherwise is considered barbaric. As Obi-Wan said, "An elegant weapon for a more civilized age."**

 **It should be noted that all uses of superlasers (Death Star) we've seen in canon conform to the 'all or nothing' principle. Both Scarif and Jedha were surrounded by a basically unpopulated area (ocean for Scarif, desert for Jedha) and only those people in the intentional target area died. Same goes for Alderaan and the Hosnian system, if you accept that the intention was to kill everyone on the planet.**


	36. Fired

**From The Force Awakens:**

General Hux: "The weapon. It is ready. I believe the time has come to use it. We shall destroy the government that supports the Resistance, the Republic. Without their friends to protect them, the Resistance will be vulnerable, and we will stop them before they reach Skywalker."

Snoke: "Go. Prepare the weapon."

* * *

They'd done this dozens of times before – charging the planet's core, powering up the lasers, preparing everything for the command to be given. That was the main difference. Hux would be giving the order from the speaking platform rather than the command center. If anything went wrong, he wouldn't be immediately on hand to address it. Given the pageantry of the final defeat of the New Republic, Hux wouldn't have it any other way, but it meant things needed to go off flawlessly.

He'd gotten rather used to that as a requirement in his life. He could look back on the previous six years as an achievement greater than even Krennic – fewer delays, although he couldn't say much about the budget. Fortunately for him, Snoke didn't say much about the budget, either. You could probably buy a small star system with the cost overruns.

Not that they were in debt. The corporations which built construction droids and starships were more than willing to accept kyber as payment. As they had hollowed out the planet's core, they'd unearthed literal tons of the stuff. The diffusion of such crystal throughout the galaxy's manufacturing centers might yet be the greatest net achievement of Starkiller. It was an amusing thought.

There were other uses for the planet that Hux had been pursuing with more than mere amusement. Their first test shots had been at the lowest power setting, studying the interference patterns of the energy wave as it punched through hyperspace.

It was soon obvious this could be used to illuminate hyperspace hazards. Small adjustments in aim lit up other paths. They continued a slow sweep and multiple lasings until they marked out a path that had no obstructions. Voila – a new hyperspace route, safely mapped, in seconds. (Or, well, six years and a great deal of blood and sweat since one had to build Starkiller first. It was a trivial cost. Hux would do it again in a heartbeat.)

Once they had fully tested the charging system and taken their test shots, they had snuffed out the star Starkiller originally orbited, earning its name in truth. The next test was moving the planet through hyperspace. Despite the concerns they might shake the planet apart, it worked.

From a position near the First Order core worlds, he mapped further jump trajectories, this time at Snoke's order. These would be the routes the First Order used to make it possible to move their fleet rapidly through the galaxy along previously unknown paths, surprising their enemies and conquering the New Republic. In very short order, Hux began to see victory take shape.

It was none too soon. Just as Snoke had predicted, this was coming down to the wire on timing. The First Order was discovered, harassed, and in some cases outright attacked by a New Republic force led by General Organa. Not that the New Republic would admit to that.

The New Republic pretended to the rest of the galaxy that Organa's organization was separate, all while it used New Republic ships, pilots and agents recruited from the various New Republic militaries, and was headed by Organa, one of the founders of the New Republic. Her 'discrediting' for being the daughter of Darth Vader looked like theatre – a public relations move to create deniability for the new military she headed, one more aggressive than the New Republic wanted to admit they had on the payroll.

From Hux's own experience of the military – the importance of chain of command, the lack of meaningful opportunities for disobedience, the impossibility of treason on the scale of the Resistance – he couldn't imagine a situation where Organa could have done what she'd done without the support and endorsement of the leadership of the New Republic.

To him, the Senate _had_ to know. They were either intentionally turning a blind eye to the details while Organa got on with her mission, or they were giving her orders directly while they just as intentionally promoted a false narrative to the rest of the galaxy. In either case, they were lying about the most important thing possible – that they were a false authority, and that the real one, the First Order, was coming back to restore law, order, and legitimate government to the galaxy.

Bizarrely, they painted the First Order as some kind of lunatic fringe element. They gave no explanation for the imperial-era star destroyers or the actual imperials themselves manning them. They dismissed the very real support the First Order had from the power brokers of the galaxy. They ignored Kuat and Sienar and what was left of the Trade Federation, the Banking Clan, and the Techno Union.

These were the corporations that had built the galaxy as the New Republic knew it, whose voices were no longer listened to in the Senate, and who had provided material support to the First Order just as they had to the Empire. Without Starkiller's kyber, they would have _owned_ the First Order, bought and paid for as a mercenary force to promote and protect their interests. Hux had to admit Snoke's sorcery had made the Order financially independent. _Free_.

With the New Republic gone, there would be no support for the Resistance. The last bastion of hope for the Rebellion would be wiped out quickly. Hopefully, it would be before they could rally Luke Skywalker for some repeat of his Death Star trench run, but if not … that was what Kylo Ren was for.

It was with all this in mind that he wrote the coordinates for the Hosnian system on a slip of paper. His handwriting was poor, but legible. He hand-carried this to the operators as the mode of transmission, standing by as each of the three verified the numbers. It would not do to miss. As far as he knew, Ren had not won his argument with Snoke in asking that the other planets be spared. Neither had Hux. As he had all his life, he followed the orders he'd been given.

* * *

The various tests and operations of Starkiller had precipitated most of the moisture from the air and dropped the average global temperature. The planet and the plant life on it interpreted this as winter. Should they survive the upcoming battles, then Hux would choose some nice orbital band with plenty of sunlight to restore the natural order of things. He watched as Phasma finished speaking in her comm, making the last adjustments for the troopers arranged on the parade ground.

She walked over to him. "Ready."

Hux turned to Captain Opan. "How do I look?"

Opan gave him a tight nod. "Your father would be proud."

Hux snorted in amusement. "I suppose he would be, if he were here to see it. This isn't about the past, though. It's about the future."

"Isn't it always?"

Hux huffed, rolling his shoulders to work out tension. He turned to stare at the edge of the platform, where he'd be giving the speech from. It looked awfully cold and windy. He hoped his hat didn't blow off. The stormtroopers assembled had to be even colder. Not wanting to make them wait, he gave the signal to begin.

* * *

The ground shook slightly as the massive weapon released the full charge of power. The beam shot upward, appearing to streak off into space in an impressive and mind-bending display of perspective. The leaked infrared radiation was endurable from here – the warmth was pleasant after the bitter cold. Armitage Hux gazed up at the blazing light pouring out of the planet and disappearing into deepest space. He trembled at what he had wrought.

So many lives would be snuffed out. It was tempting to think of the deaths as needless. When you pulled the trigger on a blaster, you were supposed to be utterly certain of your target. He knew this, and he was. There were innocents on Hosnian Prime - billions of them. But there was also the Senate. There was also the assembled fleet of the New Republic who had gathered together all their ships with the intent of acting on the information Organa had provided to them.

With one shot, the First Order would decapitate the rebel government, destroy their weaponry, and send a signal to the rest of the galaxy of the cost of continued rebellion. Maybe with one shot, they would prevent the deaths of millions or billions more that could be lost if the war dragged on. But saving lives was not his priority – restoring order was. With the galaxy set to rights, peace would return and progress could resume.

His father would have been proud to see a Hux having a role in victory. But he'd be envious, too, and jealous. He'd have hateful and insecure things to say about Armitage's efforts, undermining the moment. He was destructive and toxic. He'd make sure Armitage knew victory was only due to him and Armitage was nothing but a tool. He knew he was a tool, but stars be damned if he'd let the man rub his face in it. He had too much pride for that. Vanity. Arrogance. All those things Snoke accused him of.

Snoke. The last six years ran through his mind – the worry, the turmoil, the effort, the laughter so rare that it was sweet when he found it. The pain. The suffering he still couldn't bring himself to think about. He didn't try, either. He didn't want to consider the role it played in goading him on. It would be cowardly and despicable to need such urging to do his duty. He should have done it freely and correctly without prodding. He'd earned his punishments. Or maybe not, because each one he thought of, he hadn't deserved. But they'd been his fault? He didn't know. He pushed it from his mind.

The beam was beginning to attenuate and fade. Hux swallowed, inhaled deeply, and let the air out slowly. His shoulders rose and fell with the motion. His lips parted. His heart was hammering in his chest, which he told himself was caused by the strange vibration from the weapon. He wished there was someone here to talk to, someone to be with, someone to express … things … himself … to, about all of this. There were so many things he didn't understand. There was such pain in his heart from what firing this thing had done. It was like a wound had opened inside of him.

Sloane gone. Thrawn gone. Even Cheskar – gone. People feared him. Hated him. This was only going to make that worse. Most of the galaxy would know his name now … and blame him. And he _was_ to blame; he didn't deny that. Not everyone got to be a hero or thought well of. He wished he had friends. This was not a good way to go about getting them, he reflected.

"For Cheskar," he whispered as the beam finally disappeared. He pulled off his cap, mussing his hair, and thought about all the people who were about to die because of his command. He crumpled the stiff fabric over his heart. He didn't think he regretted it … but he _was_ sorry.


End file.
